Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning based Distributed Renewable Energy Matching for Datacenters

The rapid growth of cloud computing in cloud datacenters in recent decades greatly increases the brown energy consumption in datacenters, and hence significant increase of carbon emission that negatively impacts on the environment as well as the monetary cost. More and more cloud service providers are adopting renewable energy as the energy supply to offset the consumption of brown energy. Meanwhile, an increasing number of renewable energy generators have been built to meet the needs. However, the instability of the renewable energy cannot guarantee the support to the datacenter and the energy competition of different datacenters may lead to datacenter energy outage. In this paper, we focus on the problem of how to match different renewable energy generators to the datacenters from different cloud providers to minimize the carbon emission, monetary cost, and service level objective (SLO) violation due to renewable energy shortage. The challenges here are that the datacenters may compete in energy requesting, the renewable energy generation is not stable and the decision should be made quickly. There have been no previous efforts devoting to this problem. To solve the problem, we first test several machine learning techniques on long-term prediction accuracy on renewable energy generation and energy demand using real traces and identify SARIMA for the prediction. We then propose a multi-agent reinforcement learning based method (MARL) for each datacenter to determine how much renewable energy to request from each generator based on the predicted results. We also propose a deadline guaranteed job postponement method (DGJP) to postpone executing unurgent jobs upon insufficient renewable energy supply. The trace-driven experiments show that MARL outperforms other methods by increasing up to 35% SLO satisfaction ratio, and reducing up to 19% (0.33 billion dollars in 90 days) total monetary cost and 33% total carbon emission, and DGJP further improves the performance.