Allocation of Discrete Energy on a Cloud-Computing Datacenter Using a Digital Power Grid

Electrical power supply of data centers constitutes major operational costs. In this paper, we focus on providing the supplying energy to exact match the consumption demands by using the properties of a digital power grid. Different from the present power grid, where energy is supplied continuously and in amounts to satisfy large demands, the digital power grid supplies energy in the form of packets and upon request. Energy packets are specifically addressed to one, or multiple servers and to no others, and they carry the amount of energy that has been requested. To evaluate the level of energy supply, we model the consumption time of a server as an ON-OFF Markov chain. Through simulation, we show that the digital grid not only reduces the energy safety margins used by current energy providers to assure system stability but it also highly satisfies the energy requests of data center servers when the capacity of the power grid equals the average energy request and without a safety margin.