MARKOV DECISION PROCESS BASED WATER SAVING IN GEO-DISTRIBUTED

DATA CENTERS

The number and scale of data centers explode with the dramatically surging demand for cloud
computing services, resulting in huge electricity consumption as well as an enormous impact on
sustainability. While numerous efforts have been dedicated to decreasing the carbon footprint of
data centers, there is a surprising and also embarrassing lack of attention to the enormity of data
center water consumption despite its emergence as a critical concern for future sustainability. In
this paper, we take the first step towards the data center water efficiency. We first identify two
characteristics of data center water efficiency: water efficiency varies by location and also over
time. The three factors, i.e., task assignment, data placement and data movement, deeply
influence the operational expenditure of data centers. In this paper, a Markov Decision Process
algorithm for Water Sustainability has been designed for a sustainable data collection centers
while cost minimization in the network dynamically schedules workloads to water-efficient data
centers for improving the overall water usage effectiveness (an emerging metric for quantifying
data center water efficiency) while satisfying the electricity cost constraint. We also perform a
trace-based simulation study to validate the analysis. The result shows that compared to the state-
of-the-art cost-minimizing MDP significantly improves the water efficiency (by 60%) and
reduces the water consumption (by 51%).