Optimal power cost management using stored energy in data centers

Rahul Urgaonkar, Bhuvan Urgaonkar, Michael J. Neely, Anand Sivasubramanian

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contribution

278 Scopus citations

Abstract

Since the electricity bill of a data center constitutes a significant portion of its overall operational costs, reducing this has become important. We investigate cost reduction opportunities that arise by the use of uninterrupted power supply (UPS) units as energy storage devices. This represents a deviation from the usual use of these devices as mere transitional fail-over mechanisms between utility and captive sources such as diesel generators. We consider the problem of opportunistically using these devices to reduce the time average electric utility bill in a data center. Using the technique of Lyapunov optimization, we develop an online control algorithm that can optimally exploit these devices to minimize the time average cost. This algorithm operates without any knowledge of the statistics of the work-load or electricity cost processes, making it attractive in the presence of workload and pricing uncertainties. An interesting feature of our algorithm is that its deviation from optimality reduces as the storage capacity is increased. Our work opens up a new area in data center power management.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Title of host publicationSIGMETRICS'11 - Proceedings of the 2011 ACM SIGMETRICS International Conference on Measurement and Modeling of Computer Systems
PublisherAssociation for Computing Machinery
Pages221-232
Number of pages12
Volume39
Edition1 SPEC. ISSUE
ISBN (Print)9781450302623
DOIs
StatePublished - 2011
Event2011 ACM SIGMETRICS International Conference on Measurement and Modeling of Computer Systems, SIGMETRICS 2011 - San Jose, United States
Duration: Jun 7 2011Jun 11 2011

Conference

Conference2011 ACM SIGMETRICS International Conference on Measurement and Modeling of Computer Systems, SIGMETRICS 2011
Country/TerritoryUnited States
CitySan Jose
Period6/7/116/11/11

All Science Journal Classification (ASJC) codes

  • Software
  • Hardware and Architecture
  • Computer Networks and Communications

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