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Published October 17, 2013 | public
Journal Article

Dynamic Right-Sizing for Power-Proportional Data Centers

Abstract

Power consumption imposes a significant cost for data centers implementing cloud services, yet much of that power is used to maintain excess service capacity during periods of low load. This paper investigates how much can be saved by dynamically "right-sizing" the data center by turning off servers during such periods and how to achieve that saving via an online algorithm. We propose a very general model and prove that the optimal offline algorithm for dynamic right-sizing has a simple structure when viewed in reverse time, and this structure is exploited to develop a new "lazy" online algorithm, which is proven to be 3-competitive. We validate the algorithm using traces from two real data-center workloads and show that significant cost savings are possible. Additionally, we contrast this new algorithm with the more traditional approach of receding horizon control.

Additional Information

© 2012 IEEE. Manuscript received February 20, 2012; revised July 27, 2012; accepted October 04, 2012; approved by IEEE/ACM TRANSACTIONS ON NETWORKING Editor Y. Bejerano. Date of publication November 22, 2012; date of current version October 11, 2013. This work was supported by the NSF under Grants CCF 0830511 and CNS 0846025, Microsoft Research, the Lee Center for Advanced Networking, and the ARC under Grant FT0991594.

Additional details

Created:
August 22, 2023
Modified:
October 26, 2023