ALEDAR: An Attentions-based Encoder-Decoder and Autoregressive model for workload Forecasting of Cloud Data Center
Wei Sun, Xiaolong Xu · 2022 IEEE 25th International Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work in Design (CSCWD) · 2022
Effective workload forecasting can provide a reference for resource scheduling in cloud data centers. Compared with the normal single data center, the multi-data center has a more complicated architecture design and provides more diverse computing services. The traditional load forecasting models need too much manual intervention to set up the parameters, meanwhile, the emerging neural network methods are not sensitive to the prediction scale and cannot capture the long-term associations between input features. To address these challenges, we propose a hybrid model named Attentions-based LSTM Encoder-Decoder network and Autoregressive model (ALEDAR), which combines neural network and statistical learning methods, to analyze the linear and nonlinear characteristics of the load sequence over time in a multi-cloud data center environment. ALEDAR uses a dual attention-based Encoder-Decoder architecture to extract the relationships between historical workload data, the design can also avoid the deterioration of prediction effect caused by long-range data scale, the output layer is composed of a three-layer perceptron. Moreover, ALEDAR employs an autoregressive module to capture the linear trend of the load sequence and eliminate scale insensitivity of input and output data. The experimental results show that our approach is adaptive and can improve the performance of host workload prediction in both single cloud data center and multi-cloud data center environments. We evaluate the performance of the proposed algorithm on real-world data sets and observe consistent improvement of 9.7% - 34.2% over the state-of-the-art baselines.