On Energy Conservation in Data Centers
Susanne Albers · 2017
We formulate and study an optimization problem that arises in the energy management of data centers and, more generally, multiprocessor environments. Data centers host a large number of heterogeneous servers. Each server has an active state and several standby/sleep states with individual power consumption rates. The demand for computing capacity varies over time. Idle servers may be transitioned to low-power modes so as to rightsize the pool of active servers. The goal is to find a state transition schedule for the servers that minimizes the total energy consumed. On a small scale the same problem arises in multi-core architectures with heterogeneous processors on a chip. One has to determine active and idle periods for the cores so as to guarantee a certain service and minimize the consumed energy.