Dynamic server power capping for enabling data center participation in power markets

Today´s US power markets offer new opportunities for the energy consumers to reduce their energy costs by first promising an average consumption rate for the next hour and then by following a regulation signal broadcast by the independent system operators (ISOs), who need to match supply and demand in real time in presence of volatile and intermittent renewable energy generation. This paper leverages the power regulation capabilities of the servers so as to enable the data centers to participate in these emerging power markets. As the data center energy consumption continues to grow, proposed participation in the power markets has the promise to achieve significant monetary savings. The paper first solves a data center regulation service (RS) optimization problem to determine the optimal average power consumption and regulation quantity that minimize the energy cost. We then propose a dynamic server power capping technique to modulate the real-time power consumption in response to ISO requests while maintaining the desired quality-of-service (QoS). Experiments on a real-life server demonstrate that our technique can reduce the energy cost by 29% on average compared to using a fixed power cap.