OpenDT: Exploring Datacenter Performance and Sustainability with a Self-Calibrating Digital Twin

TL;DR

OpenDT is an open-source digital twin platform for datacenters that enables continuous monitoring, simulation, and adaptive operation to improve performance and energy efficiency.

Contribution

We present OpenDT, the first open-source digital twin for datacenters, featuring live telemetry, self-calibration, and human-in-the-loop decision support.

Findings

OpenDT can reproduce and extend peer-reviewed experiments.

Online re-calibration improves digital-twinning accuracy to a MAPE of 4.39%.

OpenDT is available under open-source principles at the provided GitHub link.

Abstract

Datacenters are the backbone of our digital society, but raise numerous operational challenges. We envision digital twins becoming primary instruments in datacenter operations, continuously and autonomously helping with major operational decisions and with adapting ICT infrastructure, live, with a human-in-the-loop. Although fields such as aviation and autonomous driving successfully employ digital twins, an open-source digital twin for datacenters has not been demonstrated to the community. Addressing this challenge, we design, implement, and experiment using OpenDT, an Open-source, Digital Twin for monitoring and operating datacenters through a continuous integration cycle that includes: (1) live and continuous telemetry data; (2) discrete-event simulation using live telemetry from the physical ICT, with self-calibration; and (3) SLO-aware and human-approved feedback to physical ICT. Through trace-driven experiments with a prototype mainly covering stages 1 and 2 of the cycle, we show that (i) OpenDT can be used to reproduce peer-reviewed experiments and extend the analysis with performance and energy-efficiency results; (ii) OpenDT's online re-calibration can increase digital-twinning accuracy, quantified to a MAPE of 4.39% vs. 7.86% in peer-reviewed work. OpenDT adheres to FAIR/FOSS principles and is available at: https://github.com/atlarge-research/opendt/tree/hcp.