Smart grid-aware scheduling in data centres

Mäsker, M; Nagel, L; Brinkmann, A; Lotfifar, F; Johnson, M

Abstract

In several countries the expansion and establishment of renewable energies result in widely scattered and often weather-dependent energy production, decoupled from energy demand. Large, fossil-fuelled power plants are gradually replaced by many small power stations that transform wind, solar and water power into electrical power. This leads to changes in the historically evolved power grid that favours top-down energy distribution from a backbone of large power plants to widespread consumers. Now, with the increase of energy production in lower layers of the grid, there is also a bottom-up flow of the grid infrastructure compromising its stability. In order to locally adapt the energy demand to the production, some countries have started to establish Smart Grids to incentivise customers to consume energy when it is generated. This paper investigates how data centres can benefit from variable energy prices in Smart Grids. In view of their low average utilisation, data centre providers can schedule the workload dependent on the energy price. We consider a scenario for a data centre in Paderborn, Germany, hosting a large share of interruptible and migratable computing jobs. We suggest and compare two scheduling strategies for minimising energy costs. The first one merely uses current values from the Smart Meter to place the jobs, while the other one also estimates the future energy price in the grid based on weather forecasts. In spite of the complexity of the prediction problem and the inaccuracy of the weather data, both strategies perform well and have a strong positive effect on the utilisation of renewable energy and on the reduction of energy costs. Our experiments and cost analysis show that our simple-to-apply low-cost strategies reach utilisations and savings close to the optimum.

Citation

Mäsker, M., Nagel, L., Brinkmann, A., Lotfifar, F., & Johnson, M. (2015, December). Smart grid-aware scheduling in data centres. Presented at 2015 Sustainable Internet and ICT for Sustainability (SustainIT), Madrid, Spain

• Presentation Conference Type: Conference Paper (published)
• Conference Name: 2015 Sustainable Internet and ICT for Sustainability (SustainIT)
• Publication Date: Apr 15, 2015
• Deposit Date: May 26, 2015
• Publicly Available Date: Nov 17, 2015
• Publisher: Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers
• Pages: 1-9
• Series Title: Conference Publications
• Book Title: 2015 Sustainable Internet and ICT for Sustainability (SustainIT 2015) : Madrid, Spain, April 14-15, 2015.
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1109/sustainit.2015.7101362
• Keywords: Computer centres, Cost reduction, Power aware computing, Scheduling, Smart power grids.
• Public URL: https://durham-repository.worktribe.com/output/1153923
• Additional Information: Date of Conference: 14-15 April 2015