Speaker: Vincent Wong University of British Columbia
Time: 2019-10-22 14:00-2019-10-22 15:00
Venue: FIT 1-515

Abstract:

The issue of energy efficiency poses a crucial challenge to today’s data centers owing to the growing requirements for data storage and analysis services. Data centers often support a range of delay-tolerant workloads with adjustable execution time under a service level agreement. This potential for workload management has motivated utility companies to deploy demand response programs to encourage data centers toward shifting workload execution away from peak load periods. However, deployment of a demand response program for data centers is challenging as there is always uncertainty in the arrival rate of workload, the local renewable generation (e.g., photovoltaic (PV) panels, wind turbines), and electricity price (e.g., in a real-time pricing scheme). The uncertainties require a dynamic provisioning of servers to optimally schedule the workload. In this talk, we will discuss how data centers can benefit from participating in demand response programs. We will focus on data centers demand response in deregulated electricity markets, where a data center can enter a contract with one of several competing utility companies. The joint decision of utility company choices and workload scheduling will be captured as a many-to-one matching game with externalities and a distributed algorithm will be developed to determine a stable outcome of such a game. Finally, we will discuss how online convex optimization techniques can be applied to obtain a local optimal workload scheduling for data centers in a demand response program without any knowledge of the stochastic process that uncertain parameters follow.

Short Bio:

Vincent Wong is a Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada. His research areas include protocol design, optimization, and resource management of communication networks, with applications to the Internet, wireless networks, smart grid, fog computing, and Internet of Things. Currently, he is an executive editorial committee member of the IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications, an Area Editor of the IEEE Transactions on Communications, and an Associate Editor of the IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing. Dr. Wong is a Fellow of the IEEE and an IEEE Communications Society Distinguished Lecturer (2019 - 2020).