Spatial and thermal aware methods for efficient workload management in distributed data centers

Geographically distributed data centers provide facilities for users to fulfill the demand of storage and computations, where most of the operational cost is due to electricity consumption. In this study, we address the problem of energy consumption of cloud data centers and identify key characteristics of techniques proposed for reducing operational costs, carbon emissions, and financial penalties due to service level agreement (SLA) violations. By considering computer room air condition (CRAC) units that utilize outside air for cooling purposes as well as temperature and space-varying properties, we propose the energy cost model which takes into account temperature ranges for cooling purposes and operations of CRAC units. Then, we propose spatio-thermal-aware algorithms to manage workload using the variation of electricity price, locational outside and within the data center temperature, where the aim is to schedule the incoming workload requests with minimum SLA violations, cooling cost, and energy consumption. We analyzed the performance of our proposed algorithms and compared the experimental results with the benchmark algorithms for metrics of interest including SLA violations, cooling cost, and overall operations cost. Modeling, experiments, and verification conducted on CloudSim with realistic data center scenarios and workload traces show that the proposed algorithms result in reduced SLA violations, save between 15% to 75% of cooling cost and between 3.89% to 39% of the overall operational cost compared to the existing solutions.