Energy-efficient resource provisioning using adaptive harmony search algorithm for compute-intensiveworkloads with load balancing in datacenters

Abstract

Drastic variations in high-performance computing workloads lead to the commencement of large number of datacenters. To revolutionize themselves as green datacenters, these data centers are assured to reduce their energy consumption without compromising the performance. The energy consumption of the processor is considered as an important metric for power reduction in servers as it accounts to 60% of the total power consumption. In this research work, a power-aware algorithm (PA) and an adaptive harmony search algorithm (AHSA) are proposed for the placement of reserved virtual machines in the datacenters to reduce the power consumption of servers. Modification of the standard harmony search algorithm is inevitable to suit this specific problem with varying global search space in each allocation interval. A task distribution algorithm is also proposed to distribute and balance the workload among the servers to evade over-utilization of servers which is unique of its kind against traditional virtual machine consolidation approaches that intend to restrain the number of powered on servers to the minimum as possible. Different policies for overload host selection and virtual machine selection are discussed for load balancing. The observations endorse that the AHSA outperforms, and yields better results towards the objective than, the PA algorithm and the existing counterparts.