Thermal-Aware Scheduling of Batch Jobs in Geographically Distributed Data Centers

Decreasing the soaring energy cost is imperative in large data centers. Meanwhile, limited computational resources need to be fairly allocated among different organizations. Latency is another major concern for resource management. Nevertheless, energy cost, resource allocation fairness, and latency are important but often contradicting metrics on scheduling data center workloads. Moreover, with the ever-increasing power density, data center operation must be judiciously optimized to prevent server overheating. In this paper, we explore the benefit of electricity price variations across time and locations. We study the problem of scheduling batch jobs to multiple geographically-distributed data centers. We propose a provably-efficient online scheduling algorithm - GreFar - which optimizes the energy cost and fairness among different organizations subject to queueing delay constraints, while satisfying the maximum server inlet temperature constraints. GreFar does not require any statistical information of workload arrivals or electricity prices. We prove that it can minimize the cost arbitrarily close to that of the optimal offline algorithm with future information. Moreover, we compare the performance of GreFar with ones of a similar algorithm, referred to as T-unaware, that is not able to consider the server inlet temperature in the scheduling process. We prove that GreFar is able to save up to 16 percent of energy-fairness cost with respect to T-unaware.