Cost-aware virtual machine allocation for off-grid green data centers

Abstract

Data centers have been widely used in many pervasive computing applications. This paper shows the cost-aware virtual machine allocation problem for off-grid green data centers is an integer programming problem which is NP-hard. The paper presents a cost-aware virtual machine allocation algorithm which attempts to utilize renewable energy sources and minimize the energy cost of fossil fuel while maintaining the quality-of-service requirements of the tasks. The simulation results show that the proposed algorithm is sensitive to the changes in the price of fossil fuel, and is able to achieve scalable performance.