Enabling Demand Response in a computer cluster

Abstract

Demand Response(DR) is a method for stimulating end-users to adjust consumption to support the change in the electricity market. DR can be used to improve the stability of power supply including the power generation, transmission and distribution. It can also be used to improve electricity market operation. Furthermore, significant cost savings can be made on the consumer side via the financial incentives in a range of DR programs. As the cloud computing paradigm gains popularity, there is an associated rapid growth of public and private data centers. Data center energy consumption increases significantly. Putting data center energy consumption in the context of power grid becomes important. In this paper, we propose an architecture to integrate data centre computer clusters with a DR service. The resource manager of a cluster can therefore take DR events into account when allocating resources. We particularly focus on resource provisioning for parallel workloads in such a cluster, and propose a DR strategy that is capable of balancing energy savings and user satisfaction.