Spatio-temporal thermal-aware job scheduling to minimize energy consumption in virtualized heterogeneous data centers

Job scheduling in data centers can be considered from a cyber–physical point of view, as it affects the data center’s computing performance (i.e. the cyber aspect) and energy efficiency (the physical aspect). Driven by the growing needs to green contemporary data centers, this paper uses recent technological advances in data center virtualization and proposes cyber–physical, spatio-temporal (i.e. start time and servers assigned), thermal-aware job scheduling algorithms that minimize the energy consumption of the data center under performance constraints (i.e. deadlines). Savings are possible by being able to temporally “spread” the workload, assign it to energy-efficient computing equipment, and further reduce the heat recirculation and therefore the load on the cooling systems. This paper provides three categories of thermal-aware energy-saving scheduling techniques: (a) FCFS-Backfill-XInt and FCFS-Backfill-LRH, thermal-aware job placement enhancements to the popular first-come first-serve with back-filling (FCFS-backfill) scheduling policy; (b) EDF-LRH, an online earliest deadline first scheduling algorithm with thermal-aware placement; and (c) an offline genetic algorithm for SCheduling to minimize thermal cross-INTerference (SCINT), which is suited for batch scheduling of backlogs. Simulation results, based on real job logs from the ASU Fulton HPC data center, show that the thermal-aware enhancements to FCFS-backfill achieve up to 25% savings compared to FCFS-backfill with first-fit placement, depending on the intensity of the incoming workload, while SCINT achieves up to 60% savings. The performance of EDF-LRH nears that of the offline SCINT for low loads, and it degrades to the performance of FCFS-backfill for high loads. However, EDF-LRH requires milliseconds of operation, which is significantly faster than SCINT, the latter requiring up to hours of runtime depending upon the number and size of submitted jobs. Similarly, FCFS-Backfill-LRH is much faster than FCFS-Backfill-XInt, but it achieves only part of FCFS-Backfill-XInt’s savings.