HEROS: Energy-Efficient Load Balancing for Heterogeneous Data Centers

Heterogeneous architectures have become more popular and widespread in the recent years with the growing popularity of general-purpose processing on graphics processing units, low-power systems on a chip, multi- and many-core architectures, asymmetric cores, coprocessors, and solid-state drives. The design and management of cloud computing data-centers must adapt to these changes while targeting objectives of improving system performance, energy efficiency and reliability. This paper presents HEROS, a novel load balancing algorithm for energy-efficient resource allocation in heterogeneous systems. HEROS takes into account the heterogeneity of a system during the decision-making process and uses a holistic representation of the system. As a result, servers that contain resources of multiple types (computing, memory, storage and networking) and have varying internal structures of their components can be utilized more efficiently.