Title
Toward Efficient Compute-Intensive Job Allocation for Green Data Centers: A Deep Reinforcement Learning Approach
Abstract
Reducing the energy consumption of the servers in a data center via proper job allocation is desirable. Existing advanced job allocation algorithms, based on constrained optimization formulations capturing servers' complex power consumption and thermal dynamics, often scale poorly with the data center size and optimization horizon. This paper applies deep reinforcement learning (DRL) to build an allocation algorithm for long-lasting and compute-intensive jobs that are increasingly seen among today's computation demands. Specifically, a deep Q-network is trained to allocate jobs, aiming to maximize a cumulative reward over long horizons. The training is performed offline using a computational model based on long short-term memory networks that capture the servers' power and thermal dynamics. This offline training approach avoids slow online convergence, low energy efficiency, and potential server overheating during the DRL's extensive state-action space exploration if it directly interacts with the physical data center in the usually adopted online learning scheme. At run time, the trained Q-network is forward-propagated with little computation to allocate jobs. Evaluation based on 8 months' physical state and job arrival records from a national supercomputing data center hosting 1,152 processors shows that our solution reduces computing power consumption by nearly 10% and processor temperature by more than 3°C without sacrificing job processing throughput.
Year
DOI
Venue
2019
10.1109/ICDCS.2019.00069
2019 IEEE 39th International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems (ICDCS)
Keywords
Field
DocType
Energy efficiency,Job allocation,Deep reinforcement learning
Resource management,Supercomputer,Computer science,Server,Throughput,Data center,Energy consumption,Reinforcement learning,Constrained optimization,Distributed computing
Conference
ISSN
ISBN
Citations 
1063-6927
978-1-7281-2520-6
1
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.36
0
4
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Deliang Yi110.36
Xin Zhou212615.50
Yonggang Wen32512156.47
Rui Tan48314.62