An Online Emergency Demand Response Mechanism for Cloud Computing

This article studies emergency demand response (EDR) mechanisms from a data center perspective, where a cloud participates in a mandatory EDR program while receiving computing job bids from cloud users in an online fashion. We target a realistic EDR mechanism where (i) the cloud provider dynamically packs different types of resources on servers into requested VMs and computes job schedules to meet users’ requirements, (ii) the power consumption of servers in the cloud is limited by the grid through the EDR program, and (iii) the operation cost of the cloud is considered in the calculation of social welfare, measured by an electricity cost that consists of both volume charge and peak charge. We propose an online auction for dynamic cloud resource provisioning that is under the control of the EDR program, runs in polynomial time, achieves truthfulness, and close-to-optimal social welfare for the cloud ecosystem. In the design of the online auction, we first propose a new framework, compact exponential LPs, to handle job scheduling constraints in the time domain. We then develop a posted pricing auction framework toward the truthful online auction design, which leverages the classic primal-dual technique for approximation algorithm design. We evaluate our online auctions through both theoretical analysis and empirical studies driven by real-world traces.