Reducing Electricity Cost Through Virtual Machine Placement in High Performance Computing Clouds

In this paper, we first study the impact of load placement policies on cooling and maximum data center temperatures in cloud ser-vice providers that operate multiple geographically distributed data centers. Based on this study, we then propose dynamic load dis-tribution policies that consider all electricity-related costs as well as transient cooling effects. Our evaluation studies the ability of different cooling strategies to handle load spikes, compares the be-haviors of our dynamic cost-aware policies to cost-unaware and static policies, and explores the effects of many parameter settings. Among other interesting results, we demonstrate that (1) our poli-cies can provide large cost savings, (2) load migration enables sav-ings in many scenarios, and (3) all electricity-related costs must be considered at the same time for higher and consistent cost savings