Coordinated energy management for colocation data centers in smart grids

Colocation data center is an important type of data centers that has some unique challenges in managing its energy consumption. Tenants in a colocation data center usually manage their servers independently without coordination, leading to inefficiency. To address this issue, we propose a formulation of coordinated energy management for colocation data centers. We formulate it as a large-scale optimization problem, and then develop a novel decentralized algorithm to solve it efficiently. Our algorithm is based on the alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM) which converges to the global optimal solution within tens of iterations and is insensitive to step size. Extensive numerical evaluations based on real-world traces are conducted to show the performance of our algorithm.