Online Job-Migration for Reducing the Electricity Bill

Energy costs are becoming the fastest-growing element in datacenter operation costs. One basic approach to reduce these costs is to exploit the variation of electricity prices both temporally and geographically by moving computation to datacenters in which energy is available at a cheaper price. However, injudicious job migration between datacenters might increase the overall operation cost due to the bandwidth costs of transferring application state and data over the wide-area network. To address this challenge, we propose novel online algorithms for migrating batch jobs between datacenters, which handles the fundamental tradeoff between energy and bandwidth costs. A distinctive feature of our algorithms is that they consider not only the current availability and cost of (possibly multiple) energy sources, but also the future variability and uncertainty thereof. Using the framework of competitive-analysis, we establish worst-case performance bounds for our basic online algorithm. We then propose a practical, easy-to-implement version of the basic algorithm, and evaluate it through simulations on real electricity pricing and job workload data. The simulation results indicate that our algorithm outperforms plausible greedy algorithms that ignore future outcomes. Notably, the actual performance of our approach is significantly better than the theoretical guarantees, within 6% of the optimal offline solution.