Optimized Energy Cost and Carbon Emission-Aware Virtual Machine Allocation in Sustainable Data Centers

Abstract

Cloud data center’s total operating cost is conquered by electricity cost and carbon tax incurred due to energy consumption from the grid and its associated carbon emission. In this work, we consider geo-distributed sustainable datacenter’s with varying on-site green energy generation, electricity prices, carbon intensity and carbon tax. The objective function is devised to reduce the operating cost including electricity cost and carbon cost incurred on the power consumption of servers and cooling devices. We propose renewable-aware algorithms to schedule the workload to the data centers with an aim to maximize the green energy usage. Due to the uncertainty and time variant nature of renewable energy availability, an investigation is performed to identify the impact of carbon footprint, carbon tax and electricity cost in data center selection on total operating cost reduction. In addition, on-demand dynamic optimal frequency-based load distribution within the cluster nodes is performed to eliminate hot spots due to high processor utilization. The work suggests optimal virtual machine placement decision to maximize green energy usage with reduced operating cost and carbon emission.