Task Scheduling and Server Provisioning for Energy-Efficient Cloud-Computing Data Centers

In this paper, we present an optimization model for task scheduling for minimizing energy consumption in cloud-computing data centers. The proposed approach was formulated as an integer programming problem to minimize the cloud-computing data center energy consumption by scheduling tasks to a minimum numbers of servers while keeping the task response time constraints. We prove that the average task response time and the number of active servers needed to meet such time constraints are bounded through the use of a greedy task-scheduling scheme. In addition, we propose the most-efficient-server-first task-scheduling scheme to minimize energy expenditure as a practical scheduling scheme. We model and simulate the proposed scheduling scheme for a data center with heterogeneous tasks. The simulation results show that the proposed task-scheduling scheme reduces server energy consumption on average over 70 times when compared to the energy consumed under a (not-optimized) random-based task-scheduling scheme. We show that energy savings are achieved by minimizing the allocated number of servers.