Cloud data centers (CDCs) have become increasingly popular and widespread in recent years with the growing popularity of cloud computing and high-performance computing. Due to the multi-step computation of data streams and heterogeneous task dependencies, task failure frequently occurs, resulting in poor user experience and additional energy consumption. To reduce task execution failure as well as energy consumption, we propose a novel AI-driven energy-aware proactive fault-tolerant scheduling scheme for CDCs in this paper. Firstly, a prediction model based on the machine learning approach is trained to classify the arriving tasks into "failure-prone tasks" and "non-failure-prone tasks" according to the predicted failure rate. Then, two efficient scheduling mechanisms are proposed to allocate two types of tasks to the most appropriate hosts in a CDC. The vector reconstruction method is developed to construct super tasks from failure-prone tasks and separately schedule these super tasks and non-failure-prone tasks to the most suitable physical host. All the tasks are scheduled in an earliest-deadline-first manner. Our evaluation results show that the proposed scheme can intelligently predict task failure and achieves better fault tolerance and reduces total energy consumption better than the existing schemes.
The problem of high power consumption in data centers is becoming more and more prominent. In order to improve the energy efficiency of data centers, cooperatively optimizing the energy of IT systems and cooling systems has become an effective way. In this paper, a model-free deep reinforcement learning (DRL)-based joint optimization method MAD3C is developed to overcome the high-dimensional state and action space problems of the data center energy optimization. A hybrid AC-DDPG cooperative multi-agent framework is devised for the improvement of the cooperation between the IT and cooling systems for further energy efficiency improvement. In the framework, a scheduling baseline comparison method is presented to enhance the stability of the framework. Meanwhile, an adaptive score is designed for the architecture in consideration of multi-dimensional resources and resource utilization improvement. Experiments show that our proposed approach can effectively reduce energy for data centers through the cooperative optimization while guaranteeing training stability and improving resource utilization.
The energy consumption problem has become a bottleneck hindering further development of data centers. However, the heterogeneity of servers, hybrid cooling modes, and extra energy caused by system state transitions increases the complexity of the energy optimization problem. To deal with such challenges, in this paper, an Energy Aware Task Scheduling strategy (EATS) utilizing marginal cost and task classification method is proposed that cooperatively improves the energy efficiency of servers and cooling systems. An energy consumption model for servers, cooling systems, and state transition is developed, and the energy optimization problem in data centers is formulated. The concept of marginal cost is introduced to guide the task scheduling process. The task classification method is incorporated with the idea of marginal cost to further improve resource utilization and reduce the total energy consumption of data centers. Experiments are conducted using real-world traces, and energy reduction results are compared. Results show that EATS achieves more energy-savings of servers, cooling systems, state transition in comparison to the other two techniques under a various number of servers, cooling modules and task arrival intensities. It is validated that EATS is effective at reducing total energy consumption and improving the resource utilization of data centers.
1 March 2021 in Sustainable Computing: Informatics and Systems