SustainDC: Benchmarking for Sustainable Data Center Control, Ricardo Luna

Machine learning has driven an exponential increase in computational demand, leading to massive data centers that consume significant energy and contribute to climate change. This makes sustainable data center control a priority. In this paper, we introduce SustainDC, a set of Python environments for benchmarking multiagent reinforcement learning (MARL) algorithms for data centers (DC). SustainDC supports custom DC configurations and tasks such as workload scheduling, cooling optimization, and auxiliary battery management, with multiple agents managing these operations while accounting for the effects of each other. We evaluate various MARL algorithms on SustainDC, showing their performance across diverse DC designs, locations, weather conditions, grid carbon intensity, and workload requirements. Our results highlight significant opportunities to improve data center operations using MARL algorithms. Given the increasing use of DC due to AI, SustainDC provides a crucial platform for developing and benchmarking advanced algorithms essential for achieving sustainable computing and addressing other heterogeneous real-world challenges.