A Stochastic Bin Packing Approach for Server Consolidation with Conflicts

Research output: Contribution to journalResearch articleContributedpeer-review

Abstract

The energy consumption of large-scale data centers or server clusters is expected to grow significantly in the next couple of years contributing to up to 13% of the worldwide energy demand in 2030. As the involved processing units require a disproportional amount of energy when they are idle, underutilized, or overloaded, balancing the supply of and the demand for computing resources is a key issue to obtain energy-efficient server consolidations. Whereas traditional concepts mostly consider deterministic predictions of the future workloads or only aim at finding approximate solutions, in this article, we propose an exact approach to tackle the problem of assigning jobs with (not necessarily independent) stochastic characteristics to a minimal amount of servers subject to further practically relevant constraints. As a main contribution, the problem under consideration is reformulated as a stochastic bin packing problem with conflicts and modeled by an integer linear program. Finally, this new approach is tested on real-world instances obtained from a Google data center.

Details

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)296-331
Number of pages36
JournalTOP
Volume30(2)
Publication statusPublished - Jul 2022
Peer-reviewedYes

External IDs

Scopus 85113164549
Mendeley b823684d-e4b3-3e70-ab4c-297115d6e837

Keywords

Sustainable Development Goals

Keywords

  • Bin packing problem, Cutting and packing, Normal distribution, Server consolidation