Allocating Jobs with Periodic Demand Variations

In the context of service hosting in large-scale datacenters, we consider the problem faced by a provider for allocating services to machines. Based on an analysis of a public Google trace corresponding to the use of a production cluster over a long period, we propose a model where long-running services experience demand variations with a periodic (daily) pattern and we prove that services following this model acknowledge for most of the overall CPU demand. This leads to an allocation problem where the classical Bin-Packing issue is augmented with the possibility to co-locate jobs whose peaks occur at different times of the day, which is bound to be more efficient than the usual approach that consist in over-provisioning for the maximum demand. In this paper, we provide a mathematical framework to analyze the packing of services exhibiting daily patterns and whose peaks occur at different times. We propose a sophisticated SOCP (Second Order Cone Program) formulation for this problem and we analyze how this modified packing constraint changes the behavior of standard packing heuristics (such as Best-Fit or First-Fit Decreasing). We show that taking periodicity of demand into account allows for a substantial improvement on machine utilization in the context of large-scale, state-of-the-art production datacenters.