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An online electricity cost budgeting algorithm for maximizing green energy usage across data centers

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Abstract

With the sky-rocketing development of Internet services, the power usage in data centers has been significantly increasing. This ever increasing energy consumption leads to negative environmental impact such as global warming. To reduce their carbon footprints, large Internet service operators begin to utilize green energy. Since green energy is currently more expensive than the traditional brown one, it is important for the operators to maximize the green energy usage subject to their desired long-term (e.g., a month) cost budget constraint. In this paper, we propose an online algorithm GreenBudget based on the Lyapunov optimization framework. We prove that our algorithm is able to achieve a delicate tradeoff between the green energy usage and the enforcement of the cost budget constraint, and a control parameter V is the knob to arbitrarily tune such a tradeoff. We evaluate GreenBudget utilizing real-life traces of user requests, cooling efficiency, electricity price and green energy availability. Experimental results demonstrate that under the same cost budget constraint, GreenBudget can increase the green energy usage by 11.55% compared with the state-of-the-art work, without incurring any performance violation of user requests.

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported in part by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 61272460), and the Specialized Research Fund for the Doctoral Program of Higher Education (20120201110010).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Electronic and Information Engineering, Xi’an Jiaotong University, Xi’an, 710049, China

    Hui Dou & Yong Qi

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  1. Hui Dou
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  2. Yong Qi
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Correspondence to Yong Qi.

Additional information

Hui Dou received his BS in software engineering from Xi’an Jiaotong University (XJTU), China in 2011. He is currently a PhD candidate in computer science at XJTU. His research interests include cloud computing, power management and sustainable computing. His current topic mainly focus on improving cost efficiency for cloud computing.

Yong Qi received his PhD in computer software and theory from Xi’an Jiaotong University (XJTU), China in 2001. He is currently a professor in the School of Electronic and Information Engineering, XJTU and the director of the Institute of Computer Software and Theory, China. His research interests include operating systems, distributed systems, cloud computing, virtualization, system security and application. He has published more than 90 papers in international conferences and journals, including ACM VEE, IEEE ICDCS, INFOCOM, ICNP, ICPP, IEEE TR, TPDS, TSG, and TC.

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Dou, H., Qi, Y. An online electricity cost budgeting algorithm for maximizing green energy usage across data centers. Front. Comput. Sci. 11, 661–674 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11704-016-5420-y

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