Thermal aware server provisioning and workload distribution for internet data centers

With the increasing popularity of Internet-based information retrieval and cloud computing, saving energy in Internet data centers (a.k.a. hosting centers, server farms) is of increasing importance. Current research approaches are based on dynamically adjusting the active server set in order to turn off a portion of the servers and save energy without compromising the quality of service; the workload is then distributed, conventionally equally (i.e. balanced), across the active servers. Although there is ample work that demonstrates energy savings through dynamic server provisioning, there is little work on thermal-aware server provisioning. This paper provides a formulation of the thermal aware active server set provisioning (TASP), in a nonlinear minimax binary integer programming form, and a series of heuristic approaches to solving them, namely MiniMax, bb-sLRH, CP-sLRH and sLRH. Furthermore, it introduces thermal-aware workload distribution (TAWD) among the active servers. The proposed heuristics are evaluated using a thermal model of the ASU HPCI data center, while the request traffic is based on real web traces of the 1998 FIFA World Cup as well as the SPECweb2009 suite. The TASP heuristics are found to outperform a power-aware-only server set selection scheme (CPSP), by up to 9.3% for the simulated scenario. The order of achieved energy efficiency is: MiniMax (9.3% savings), CP-sLRH (9.2%), bb-sLRH (8.6%), sLRH (5.8%), compared to CPSP.