Allocating and Pricing Data Center Resources with Power‐Aware Combinatorial Auctions

This chapter reviews a method for employing a combinatorial market mechanism. This method provides a realistic model of resources, a realistic representation of goals and principled optimization. The market mechanism attempts to balance the “buyers” and “sellers” view of the data center. The chapter describes how to represent the energy‐aware data‐center allocation problem as a market. It discusses pricing rules and their incentive properties. The chapter evaluates market‐based system in a set of simulation experiments to establish computational tractability and effective allocative behavior over a wide range of environments. It also discusses an important class of generalizations to model and then turn to the essential task of devising prices for the market that have the necessary computational, economic, and game theoretic properties.