Conductor: A Collaboration Framework for Multi-Data-Center Demand Response

Power consumption of data centers is rapidly becoming more prominent as the demand for computation increases. Next-generation systems are expected to require significantly more power, making it essential to design them to operate under power constraints to achieve sustainability goals. Power utilities are responsible for constantly providing reliable power and this task becomes harder as a higher amount of renewables are integrated into the grid. Demand response (DR) programs are promising solutions to maintain grid reliability by exploiting the flexibility of power consumers, such as data centers.While prior research explores data center participation in DR, real-world examples are still limited due to the risks of operating under power constraints, such as quality-of-service (QoS) violations. To provide greater flexibility in power consumption while improving data centers’ ability to meet QoS targets, we propose Conductor, a novel framework that coordinates the participation of multiple data centers in DR, increasing their resilience to operate under power constraints without requiring any inter-data-center workload migration. Conductor assigns dynamic power targets to data centers based on their real-time QoS information and mitigates the risks of joining DR programs by recovering the QoS violations of jobs while achieving up to 78% better tracking of the power targets compared to individual data center DR participation.