A New Perspective on Energy Accounting in Multi-Tenant Data Centers

Energy accounting plays a crucial role in optimizing data center energy efficiency. Nonetheless, in a multi-tenant data center, it is challenging to fairly account for nonIT energy on an individual tenant basis, because each non-IT system (e.g., power supply and cooling) is shared by multiple tenants and only the system-level non-IT energy consumption can be measured. Existing policies, e.g., proportionally or equally attributing non-IT energy to tenants, may attribute different energy to two “equivalent” tenants and hence are not fair. In this paper, we propose QSEA, a quick Shapley value-based energy accounting policy for multi-tenant data centers. QSEA is provably fair and also easy to implement with little to zero overhead. We run trace-based simulations and demonstrate that, compared to the exact Shapley value approach that has an exponential complexity, QSEA yields almost the same energy accounting result while having a negligible computation time.