Saving on Data Center Energy Bills with EDEALS: Electricity Demand-response Easy Adjusted Load Shifting

Energy demand response presents a highly cost-effective means to improve the sustainability of data centers whenever there is flexibility in task scheduling. This paper presents an empirical study in the area of data center demand response, with the goal of cost savings on electricity bills for small to medium size data centers drawing 1-5 MegaWatts. Using the SLURM resource manager, we demonstrate a methodology for energy aware load shifting by flexibly reducing compute cycles at times of peak energy demand. Simply reducing the pool of available servers during a brief period of peak energy demand results in tangible cost savings through reduced power consumption of the server cluster, with minimal performance degradation to users. We have developed a data processing pipeline, EDEALS, to determine the potential cost savings of partial data center shutdown to enable demand-response load shifting. As our baseline, we measured the power draw and job scheduling delay of a small-scale test cluster by varying available resources. We then model a production cluster’s performance in response to a realistic energy constraint imposed by a utility provider. For our data center, we quantify a potential annual cost savings on electricity of 7% while only causing 16 hours of total increased wait time (0.1%) throughout the entire year.