Modeling the failures of power-aware data centers by leveraging heat recirculation

With the explosive growth of data, hundreds of thousands of servers may be contained in a single data center. Hence, node failures are unavoidable and generally negatively effects the performance of the whole data center. Additionally, data centers with a large number of nodes will cause plenty of energy consumption. Many existing task scheduling techniques can effectively reduce the power consumption in data centers by considering heat recirculation. However, the traditional techniques do not take the situation of node failures into account. This paper proposes an airflow-based failure model for data centers by leveraging heat recirculation. In this model, the spatial distribution and time distribution of failures are considered. Furthermore, a genetic algorithm (GA) and a simulated annealing algorithm (SA) are implemented to evaluate the proposed failure model. Because the positions of node failures have a significant impact on the heat recirculation and the energy consumption of data centers, failures with different positions are analyzed and evaluated. The experimental results demonstrate that the energy consumption of data centers can be significantly reduced by using the GA and SA algorithms for task scheduling based on the proposed failure model.