Nowadays, more and more companies migrate business from their own servers to the cloud. With the influx of computational requests, datacenters consume tremendous energy every day, attracting great attention in the energy efficiency dilemma.
In “Intelligent Resource Management in Blockchain-Based Cloud Datacenters,” (login may be required for full text) which appears in the November/December 2017 issue of IEEE Cloud Computing, researchers from Nanjing University of Posts and Telecommunications and Shanghai Jiao Tong University investigate the energy-aware resource management problem in cloud datacenters, where green energy with unpredictable capacity is connected. Via proposing a robust blockchain-based decentralized resource management framework, they save the energy consumed by the request scheduler.
Moreover, they propose a reinforcement learning method embedded in a smart contract to further minimize the energy cost. Because the reinforcement learning method is informed from the historical knowledge, it relies on no request arrival and energy supply. Experimental results on Google cluster traces and real-world electricity price show that their approach is able to reduce the datacenters cost significantly compared with other benchmark algorithms.
About Lori Cameron
Lori Cameron is a Senior Writer for the IEEE Computer Society and currently writes regular features for Computer magazine, Computing Edge, and the Computing Now and Magazine Roundup websites. Contact her at l.cameron@computer.org. Follow her on LinkedIn.
