Towards energy-aware scheduling in data centers using machine learning

As energy-related costs have become a major economical factor for IT infrastructures and data-centers, companies and the research community are being challenged to find better and more efficient power-aware resource management strategies. There is a growing interest in "Green" IT and there is still a big gap in this area to be covered. In order to obtain an energy-efficient data center, we propose a framework that provides an intelligent consolidation methodology using different techniques such as turning on/off machines, power-aware consolidation algorithms, and machine learning techniques to deal with uncertain information while maximizing performance. For the machine learning approach, we use models learned from previous system behaviors in order to predict power consumption levels, CPU loads, and SLA timings, and improve scheduling decisions. Our framework is vertical, because it considers from watt consumption to workload features, and cross-disciplinary, as it uses a wide variety of techniques. We evaluate these techniques with a framework that covers the whole control cycle of a real scenario, using a simulation with representative heterogeneous workloads, and we measure the quality of the results according to a set of metrics focused toward our goals, besides traditional policies. The results obtained indicate that our approach is close to the optimal placement and behaves better when the level of uncertainty increases.