Site-Wide HPC Data Center Demand Response

As many electricity markets are trending towards greater renewable energy generation, there will be an increased need for electrical grids to cooperatively balance electricity supply and demand. Data centers are one large consumer of electricity on a global scale, and they are well-suited to act as a grid load stabilizer via performing “demand response.” Prior investigations in this space have demonstrated how data centers can continue to meet their users' quality of service (QoS) needs by modeling relationships between cluster job queues, server power properties, and application performance. While server power is a major factor in data center power consumption, other components such as cooling systems contribute a non-nealiaible amount of electricity demand. This work proposes using a simple site-wide (i.e., including all components of the data center) power model on top of QoS-aware demand response solutions to achieve the QoS benefits of those solutions while improving the cost-saving opportunities in demand response. We demonstrate 1.3x cost savings compared to QoS-aware demand response policies that do not utilize site-wide power models, and show similar savings in cases of severely under-predicted site-wide power consumption if 1.5x relaxed QoS constraints are allowed.