Combined use of coral reefs optimization and multi-agent deep Q-network for energy-aware resource provisioning in cloud data centers using DVFS technique

Big data processing, scientific calculations, and multimedia operations are some applications that require very complex time-consuming computations which cannot be performed on personal computers. Utilizing powerful cloud resources is a common method to address this problem. The amount of energy consumption of cloud data centers is an important challenge in these complex calculations, and reducing the energy consumption of cloud data centers is one of the most important goals of the researches in this area. The proposed method of this paper, called multi-agent deep Q-network with coral reefs optimization (MDQ-CR), combines the coral reefs optimization algorithm and multi-agent deep Q-network to reduce the energy consumption of data centers and cloud resources using the dynamic voltage and frequency scaling (DVFS) technique. The MDQ-CR has two main phases. The first phase exploits coral reefs optimization algorithm with a short-term view, and the second phase uses deep Q-network with a long-term view. The Markov game model is used to lead the learning agents to converge to the global optimal solution. Since processors consume the highest amount of energy of cloud compared to the other resources, the proposed method focuses on reducing the processors' energy consumption. Reducing the voltage and frequency of processors, considering expiration times of their tasks, can reduce their energy consumption significantly. The empirical experiments show that the proposed method can save energy about 89% compared to completely randomized methods, and about 20% compared to the two recent methods of the literature.

Automated summary

The proposed method, MDQ-CR, combines coral reefs optimization algorithm and multi-agent deep Q-network to reduce the energy consumption of data centers and cloud resources. By utilizing techniques like dynamic voltage and frequency scaling for processors, the method shows higher energy savings compared to other methods in empirical experiments.