Robust geographical load balancing for sustainable data centers

Abstract

A systematic framework is put forth in this paper to integrate renewable energy sources (RES), distributed storage units, cooling facilities, as well as dynamic pricing into the workload and energy management tasks for a data center network. To cope with RES uncertainty, the resource allocation task is formulated as a robust optimization problem minimizing the worst-case net cost. The resulting problem is reformulated as a convex program, and then solved in a distributed fashion using the dual decomposition approach. Numerical tests demonstrate the performance gain of the proposed approach over the existing alternative.