Sustainable AIGC Workload Scheduling of Geo-Distributed Data Centers: A Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning Approach

TL;DR

This paper presents a multi-agent reinforcement learning approach for scheduling AI training workloads across geo-distributed data centers, optimizing GPU utilization, operational costs, and carbon emissions.

Contribution

It introduces a novel multi-agent reinforcement learning algorithm tailored for multi-objective scheduling in geo-distributed data centers, considering real-world workload and energy data.

Findings

Improves system utility by up to 28.6%

Enhances GPU utilization and reduces energy costs

Lowers carbon emissions significantly

Abstract

Recent breakthroughs in generative artificial intelligence have triggered a surge in demand for machine learning training, which poses significant cost burdens and environmental challenges due to its substantial energy consumption. Scheduling training jobs among geographically distributed cloud data centers unveils the opportunity to optimize the usage of computing capacity powered by inexpensive and low-carbon energy and address the issue of workload imbalance. To tackle the challenge of multi-objective scheduling, i.e., maximizing GPU utilization while reducing operational costs, we propose an algorithm based on multi-agent reinforcement learning and actor-critic methods to learn the optimal collaborative scheduling strategy through interacting with a cloud system built with real-life workload patterns, energy prices, and carbon intensities. Compared with other algorithms, our proposed method improves the system utility by up to 28.6% attributable to higher GPU utilization, lower energy cost, and less carbon emission.