Power Modeling for Effective Datacenter Planning and Compute Management

Over the past decade, there has been a global growth in datacenter capacity, power consumption and the associated costs. Accurate mapping of datacenter resource usage (CPU, RAM, etc.) and hardware configurations (servers, accelerators, etc.) to its power consumption is necessary for efficient long-term infrastructure planning and real-time compute load management. This paper presents two types of statistical power models that relate CPU usage of Google’s Power Distribution Units (PDUs, commonly referred to as power domains) to their power consumption. The models are deployed in production and are used for cost- and carbon-aware load management, power provisioning and infrastructure rightsizing. They are simple, interpretable and exhibit uniformly high prediction accuracy in modeling power domains with large diversity of hardware configurations and workload types across Google fleet. A multi-year validation of the deployed models demonstrate that they can predict power with less than 5% Mean Absolute Percent Error (MAPE) for more than 95% diverse PDUs across Google fleet. This performance matches the best reported accuracies coming from studies that focus on specific workload types, hardware platforms and, typically, more complex statistical models.