Energy-Aware Aggregation of Dynamic Temporal Workload in Data Centers

Abstract: Data center providers seek to minimize their total cost of ownership (TCO), while power consumption has become a social concern. We present formulations to minimize server energy consumption and server cost under three different data center server setups (homogeneous, heterogeneous, and hybrid hetero-homogeneous clusters) with dynamic temporal workload. Our studies show that the homogeneous model significantly differs from the heterogeneous model in computational time (by an order of magnitude). To be able to compute optimal configurations in near real-time for large scale data centers, we propose two modes, aggregation by maximum and aggregation by mean. In addition, we propose two aggregation methods, static (periodic) aggregation and dynamic (aperiodic) aggregation. We found that in the aggregation by maximum mode, the dynamic aggregation resulted in cost savings of up to approximately 18% over the static aggregation. In the aggregation by mean mode, the dynamic aggregation by mean could save up to approximately 50% workload rearrangement compared to the static aggregation by mean mode. Overall, our methodology helps to understand the trade-off in energy-aware aggregation.