DCcluster-Opt: Benchmarking Dynamic Multi-Objective Optimization for Geo-Distributed Data Center Workloads

Antonio Guillen-Perez, Avisek Naug, Vineet Gundecha, Sahand Ghorbanpour, Ricardo Luna Gutierrez, Ashwin Ramesh Babu, Munther Salim, Shubhanker Banerjee, Eoin H. Oude Essink, Damien Fay, Soumyendu Sarkar

Keywords: Sustainability, Data Center Cluster, Energy Efficiency, Carbon Emissions, Optimization, Real-time Control, MultiObjective, Reinforcement Learning

TL;DR: DCcluster-Opt introduces a high-fidelity benchmark for sustainable workload scheduling in geo-distributed data centers, integrating real-world data and physics-based models to evaluate multi-objective optimization strategies via a Gym environment.

Abstract: The increasing energy demands and carbon footprint of large-scale AI require intelligent workload management in globally distributed data centers. Yet progress is limited by the absence of benchmarks that realistically capture the interplay of time-varying environmental factors (grid carbon intensity, electricity prices, weather), detailed data center physics (CPUs, GPUs, memory, HVAC energy), and geo-distributed network dynamics (latency and transmission costs). To bridge this gap, we present DCcluster-Opt: an open-source, high-fidelity simulation benchmark for sustainable, geo-temporal task scheduling. DCcluster-Opt combines curated real-world datasets, including AI workload traces, grid carbon intensity, electricity markets, weather across 20 global regions, cloud transmission costs, and empirical network delay parameters with physics-informed models of data center operations, enabling rigorous and reproducible research in sustainable computing. It presents a challenging scheduling problem where a top-level coordinating agent must dynamically reassign or defer tasks that arrive with resource and service-level agreement requirements across a configurable cluster of data centers to optimize multiple objectives. The environment also models advanced components such as heat recovery. A modular reward system enables an explicit study of trade-offs among carbon emissions, energy costs, service level agreements, and water use. It provides a Gymnasium API with baseline controllers, including reinforcement learning and rule-based strategies, to support reproducible ML research and a fair comparison of diverse algorithms. By offering a realistic, configurable, and accessible testbed, DCcluster-Opt accelerates the development and validation of next-generation sustainable computing solutions for geo-distributed data centers.

Code URL: https://github.com/HewlettPackard/sustain-cluster

Primary Area: Data for Reinforcement learning (e.g., decision and control, planning, hierarchical RL, robotics)

Submission Number: 28