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Optimal Threshold Policies for Robust Data Center Control

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Abstract

With the simultaneous rise of energy costs and demand for cloud computing, efficient control of data centers becomes crucial. In the data center control problem, one needs to plan at every time step how many servers to switch on or off in order to meet stochastic job arrivals while trying to minimize electricity consumption. This problem becomes particularly challenging when servers can be of various types and jobs from different classes can only be served by certain types of server, as it is often the case in real data centers. We model this problem as a robust Markov decision process (i.e., the transition function is not assumed to be known precisely). We give sufficient conditions (which seem to be reasonable and satisfied in practice) guaranteeing that an optimal threshold policy exists. This property can then be exploited in the design of an efficient solving method, which we provide. Finally, we present some experimental results demonstrating the practicability of our approach and compare with a previous related approach based on model predictive control.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. SYSU-CMU Joint Institute of Engineering, School of Electronics and Information Technology, Sun Yat-sen University, Guangzhou, 510275, China

    Paul Weng

  2. SYSU-CMU Joint Research Institute, Shunde 528300, Guangdong, China

    Paul Weng

  3. Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA, 15213, USA

    Zeqi Qiu  (邱泽麒), John Costanzo, Xiaoqi Yin  (阴小骐) & Bruno Sinopoli

Authors
  1. Paul Weng
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  2. Zeqi Qiu  (邱泽麒)
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  3. John Costanzo
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  4. Xiaoqi Yin  (阴小骐)
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  5. Bruno Sinopoli
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Correspondence to Paul Weng.

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Weng, P., Qiu, Z., Costanzo, J. et al. Optimal Threshold Policies for Robust Data Center Control. J. Shanghai Jiaotong Univ. (Sci.) 23, 52–60 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12204-018-1909-x

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12204-018-1909-x

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