Using Model Predictive Control in Data Centers for Dynamic Server Provisioning

In the presence of latency sensitive geo-distributed applications, users require fast service for their queries. Cloud computing provides physical servers from its data center in order to process user requests. The cloud data center consumes a huge amount of energy due to lack of management of the data center servers as the container-based service consolidation is a nontrivial task. Since the containers require less resource footprint, consolidating it in servers might make resource availability sparse. In order to reduce the energy consumption of the cloud data center, we have proposed a green container-based consolidation of the services so that the maximum number of servers can be put into idle mode without affecting the application quality of experience. The service consolidation problem has been formulated as an optimization problem considering minimization of total energy consumption of the data center as the objective, and an algorithm named Energy Aware Service consolidation using baYesian optimization (EASY) has been proposed to solve the optimization. We have evaluated the EASY algorithm in simulation using python. The experimental results have shown that EASY improves the total energy consumption of the data centers. This improvement comes at the cost of a small increase of service response time as there exists a trade-off between energy consumption and service response time.

High energy consumption in data center has become a key problem, and the Carbon (CO $$_2$$ ) emissions from data center have serious impacts on environment. To improve traditional performance-energy model and minimize energy consumption in cloud data center, an energy-efficient and QoS-aware (EEQoS) model is developed for virtual resources consolidation. The EEQoS model is designed to investigate the trade-off between energy and QoS. The user’s satisfaction degree and Euclidean distance of resources are also respectively applied to the QoS model and power model. In addition, this EEQoS model is combined with the particle swarm optimization algorithm by setting the power consumption per QoS value as the objective function to consolidate virtual resources in data center. Compared with traditional power model, the proposed model reduces response time by 27.2%, cost by 31.4%, SLA violations by 40.5% and improves throughput by 13.5% on average while increasing less than 3.8% energy consumption during the whole test period.

The growth of energy consumption in data centers is becoming one of the significant problems all over the world. The power usage of IT devices and air-conditioning (AC) units accounts for up to three-quarters of total energy consumption in typical data centers. This study discusses the effectiveness of using shutter-controlled air flow management to control cold air flow into the servers. It can impact the power consumption of both, the servers and the AC units. A raised floor data center has two types of aisles - cold and hot. In most cases, excessive volumes of cold air are pumped into the servers using cold aisles. We are proposing the utilization of a shutter to control the air flow and reduce wastage while preventing damage due to increased CPU temperature. The shutter is intended to control the air flow and maintain the temperature appropriately according to the workload of the servers. We evaluated the proposed system for controlling the flow of air into the servers. The results show that cold air volumes can be reduced by up to 92% while maintaining appropriate control of CPU temperature.

Cloud computing is the combination of grid computing, distributed computing and utility computing. Cloud computing provides various types of services (servers and storage facility) in the on demand basis. The main goal of the cloud computing is to preserve and organize the very huge data center or data forms. The data forms are composed of thousands of servers that absorb the giant (ample) amount of electricity in the word of energy. The decreasing the energy consumption in datacenter is the major challenge in cloud computing now a day. This research article is going to address the problem of high energy consumption at datacenter. Concentrate on virtual machine scheduling in cloud datacenter with Dynamic Voltage Frequency Scaling (DVFS) approach. We have combined shortest job first and Round Robin algorithms with Vibrant Quantum. This combination of algorithm is considered as shortest round vibrant queue (SRVQ) algorithm. SRVQ reduces the waiting time of the scheduling process and minimize the starvation. The DVFS and SRVQ worked together and produced fruitful results in the final experiments. This work reduced the server’s energy consumption in the cloud data center. In the final results, our proposed framework exhibits 45% of energy efficiency compare to other previously proposed algorithms. 33% of QoS performance were enhanced by our framework.

The data center Energy Consumption (EC) and the user Quality of Service (QoS) are two important influencing factors, which the cloud service provider must balance in the process of providing virtual cloud services resources (VCSR). For the VCSR over-deployment phenomenon happening in cloud computing Infrastructure as a Service (IAAS), a user-oriented deployment constraint of VCSR is proposed, and the definition of user's Service Level Agreements (SLA) and the energy consumption of data center are also suggested. On the basis of that, the model of dynamic migration of the virtual nodes is given, solved by simulated annealing algorithm. In the experiments, different strategies are compared using CloudSim. The results show that the suggested strategy has advantages on balancing the energy consumption of data center and user's QoS.

The problem of energy consumption in data centers has attracted many researchers interest recently. This paper proposes an optimal energy consumption Software Defined Network (SDN) data center model using the dynamic activation of hosts and switches. We model switches and hosts as queues and formulate a Mixed Integer Linear Programming (MILP) model to minimize energy consumption while guaranteeing Quality of Service (QoS) of data center. Our purpose is minimizing static power, port power, and memory power of data centers. Since the problem is NP-hard, we adopt Simulated Annealing algorithm to obtain the solution. Through numerical experiment, we could observe that our model is able to save reasonable energy compared to the full operation data center model.

As data centers become essential large-scale infrastructures for data processing and intelligent computing, the efficiency of their internal scheduling systems is critical for both service quality and energy consumption. The performance of these scheduling systems significantly impacts the quality of computing services and overall energy usage. However, the rapid increase in task volume, coupled with the diversity of computing resources, poses substantial challenges to traditional scheduling approaches. Conventional container scheduling approaches typically focus on either minimizing task execution time or reducing energy consumption independently, often neglecting the importance of balancing these two objectives simultaneously. In this study, a container scheduling algorithm based on the Soft Actor–Critic framework, called SAC-CS, is proposed. This algorithm aims to enhance container execution efficiency while concurrently reducing energy consumption in data centers. It employs a maximum entropy reinforcement learning approach, enabling a flexible trade-off between energy use and task completion times. Experimental evaluations on both synthetic workloads and Alibaba cluster datasets demonstrate that the SAC-CS algorithm effectively achieves joint optimization of efficiency and energy consumption, outperforming heuristic methods and alternative reinforcement learning techniques.

The 2007 US EPA report to Congress (US EPA, 2007) on the state of energy consumption in data centers brought to light the true energy inefficiencies built into today’s data centers. Marquez et al. (2008) conducted an initial analysis on the productivity of a Pacific Northwest National Lab computer using The Green Grid’s Data Center Energy Productivity metric (The Green Grid, 2008). Their study highlights how the Top500 ranking of computers disguises the serious energy inefficiency of today’s High Performance Computing data centers. In the rapidly expanding Cloud Computing space, the race will be won by the providers that deliver the lowest cost of computing — such cost is heavily influenced by the operational costs incurred by data centers. As a means to address the urgent need to lower the cost of computing, solution providers have been intensely focusing on real-time monitoring, visualization, and control/management of data centers. The monitoring aspect involves the widespread use of networks of sensors that are used to monitor key data center environmental variables such as temperature, relative humidity, air flow rate, pressure, and energy consumption. Such data is then used to visualize and analyze data center problem areas (e.g., hotspots), which is then followed by control/management actions designed to alleviate such problem areas. The authors have been researching the operational benefits of a network of sensors tied in to a software package that uses the data to visualize, analyze, and control/manage the data center cooling system and IT Equipment for maximum operational efficiency. The research is being conducted in a corporate production data center that is networked in to the authors’ company’s global network of data centers. Results will be presented that highlight the operational benefits that are realizable through real-time monitoring and visualization.

Data centers are serious, energy-hungry infrastructures that can run large scale Internet based services. Energy ingesting representations are essential in designing and improving energy-efficient operations to reduce excessive energy consumption in data centers. This paper presents a survey on Energy efficiency in data centers, importance of energy efficiency. It also describes the increasing demands for data center in worldwide and the reasons for data centers energy inefficient? In this paper we define the challenges for implementing changes in data centers and explain why and how the energy requirements of data centers are growing. After that we compare the German data center market at international level and we see the energy consumption of data centers and servers in Germany from 2010 -2016.

Cooling is a major component in the enormous energy consumption in data centers. Accurate evaluation of cooling inside a data center forms the backbone of all the attempts for improving cooling efficiency. Models based on computational fluid dynamics (CFD) are typically used for accurate evaluation, but have a drawback of high computation time. This paper presents a novel thermal predictor to evaluate data center cooling in seconds. The key idea is to extract information from a single instance of CFD simulation using metrics called as influence indices to build the fast thermal predictor. Then, this predictor can evaluate the cooling for altered operation of data center with comparable accuracy in seconds without the need for repetitive CFD simulations. This paper demonstrates the accuracy of the thermal predictor by comparing with CFD simulations for a sample, but realistic data center. The fast thermal predictor then successfully passed more challenging tests in a real production data center and proved its practical utility. The results of the thermal predictor compared with measurements carried out in the production data center are also presented. This fast thermal predictor is an important milestone in the development of a method for model-based real time control of data center cooling.

Cooling solutions in an operational data centre: A case study

Energy consumption of data center has increased dramatically due to the massive computing demands driven from every sector of the economy. Hence, data center energy management has become very important for operating data centers within environmental standards while achieving low energy cost. In order to advance the understanding of thermal management in data centers, relevant environmental information such as temperature, humidity and air quality are gathered through a network of real-time sensors or simulated via sophisticated physical models (e.g. computational fluid dynamics models). However, sensor readings of environmental parameters are collected only at sparse locations and thus cannot provide a detailed map of temperature distribution for the entire data center. While the physics models yield high resolution temperature maps, it is often not feasible, due to computational complexity of these models, to run them in real-time, which is ideally required for optimum data center operation and management. In this work, we propose a novel statistical modeling approach to updating physical model outputs in real-time and providing automatic scheduling for re-computing physical model outputs. The proposed method dynamically corrects the discrepancy between a steady-state output of the physical model and real-time thermal sensor data. We show that the proposed method can provide valuable information for data center energy management such as real-time high-resolution thermal maps. Moreover, it can efficiently detect systematic changes in a data center thermal environment, and automatically schedule physical models to be re-executed whenever significant changes are detected.

Increasing demand for Cloud infrastructure and services leads to the challenges for management and maintenance of large data Center. Data center is fully equipped with huge number of resources. Those resources consumes energy in spite of their partial or full utilization. As a result data center consumes lots of energy, which in turn increases the total cost of operation and carbon footprint in environment. These concern leads to “Green Computing”, i.e. to reduce total operational cost, Carbon Footprint in environment and efficient usage of the computing resources. In data center main processing element is virtual machine (VM), which is an instance of computing and storage resources, handles computational processes. Hence, it is important to reduce energy consumed by VM. As the workload distribution is varying in data Center as per the need, the number of VMs configured in the host are uneven, but host consumes maximum energy every time, irrespective of the workload. This leads to wastage of computational resources. This paper is intended to analyze such issues and specifically prove an algorithm which, significantly reduces energy consumption in data center, while ensuring SLA, when VM is in migration from one host to another in the data center.

Water-energy tradeoffs in data centers: A case study in hot-arid climates

In this paper two model predictive control (MPC) approaches, an on-line and an off-line MPC approach, for constrained uncertain continuous-time systems with piecewise constant control input are presented. Both MPC approaches guarantee robust asymptotic stability by taking into account the hybrid dynamics of the closed-loop system, resulting from the continuous-time system dynamics and the discrete-time model predictive controller dynamics. Examples are presented to demonstrate the applicability of the proposed MPC approaches.