Joint Energy and Computation Workload Management for Geo-distributed Data Centers

The increasing demands of data computation and storage for cloud-based services motivate the development and deployment of large-scale data centers (DCs). The energy demand of these devices is rising rapidly and becoming a noticeable challenge for current power networks. The smart grid (SG) is deemed as the future power system paradigm enabling more affordable and sustainable energy supply, which can effectively relieve the load pressure from DCs. Moreover, with growing concerns regarding harmful emissions due to combustion of fossil fuels, the exploitation of renewable energy sources (RES) has attracted extensive attention, which can benefit SGs and DCs, as well as society at large. However, the geo-distributed property of DCs and SGs and the uncertain nature of RES production pose severe challenges to the optimal management of computation and energy resources in such a tripartite coupling system. Focusing on these issues, a joint energy and computation workload management framework is proposed for enabling a sustainable DC paradigm with distributed RES. Specifically, a three-layer game is formulated to model the iterations among entities including the energy market, data center operators (DCOs), and SGs. The market includes a certain amount of RES that must be dispatched. The SG offers the DCO an electricity selling price while simultaneously importing RES from the market at a buying price in order to maximize the benefit. The DCO allocates the workload to different DCs, aiming to minimize the costs of energy consumption and carbon emissions. The interactive processes between different entities are further decomposed into two coupling Stackelberg games. We obtain the equilibrium state of the game and prove its uniqueness and optimality. Simulation experiments are conducted to evaluate the performance of the joint energy and computation workload management scheme and show its superiority over counterparts in utilizing renewable energy and reducing emissions. Furthermore, the impacts of various parameters on the utility of the system are investigated carefully. The proposed approach and obtained results provide useful insights for helping the DCO developing rational management strategies.