Electricity cost is a dominant and rapidly growing expense in data centers. Unfortunately, much of the consumed energy is wasted because servers are idle for extended periods of time.We study a capacity management problem that dynamically right-sizes a data center, matching the number of active servers with the varying demand for computing capacity. We resort to a data-center optimization problem introduced by Lin, Wierman, Andrew and Thereska [17,19] that, over a time horizon, minimizes a combined objective function consisting of operating cost, modeled by a sequence of convex functions, and server switching cost. All prior work addresses a continuous setting in which the number of active servers, at any time, may take a fractional value.In this paper, we investigate for the first time the discrete data-center optimization problem where the number of active servers, at any time, must be integer valued. Thereby we seek truly feasible solutions. First, we show that the offline problem can be solved in polynomial time. Our algorithm relies on a new, yet intuitive graph theoretic model of the optimization problem and performs binary search in a layered graph. Second, we study the online problem and extend the algorithm Lazy Capacity Provisioning (LCP) by Lin et al. [17,19] to the discrete setting. We prove that LCP is 3-competitive. Moreover, we show that no deterministic online algorithm can achieve a competitive ratio smaller than 3. Hence, while LCP does not attain an optimal competitiveness in the continuous setting, it does so in the discrete problem examined here. We prove that the lower bound of 3 also holds in a problem variant with more restricted operating cost functions, introduced by Lin et al. [17].In addition, we develop a randomized online algorithm that is 2-competitive against an oblivious adversary. It is based on the algorithm of Bansal et al.[5] (a deterministic, 2-competitive algorithm for the continuous setting) and uses randomized rounding to obtain an integral solution. Moreover, we prove that 2 is a lower bound for the competitive ratio of randomized online algorithms, so our algorithm is optimal. We prove that the lower bound still holds for the more restricted model.Finally, we address the continuous setting and give a lower bound of 2 on the best competitiveness of online algorithms. This matches an upper bound by Bansal et al. [5]. A lower bound of 2 was also recently shown by Antoniadis and Schewior [3]. We develop an independent proof that extends to the scenario with more restricted operating cost.

This article deals with random projections applied as a data reduction technique for Bayesian regression analysis. We show sufficient conditions under which the entire $d$-dimensional distribution is approximately preserved under random projections by reducing the number of data points from $n$ to $k\in O(\operatorname{poly}(d/\varepsilon))$ in the case $n\gg d$. Under mild assumptions, we prove that evaluating a Gaussian likelihood function based on the projected data instead of the original data yields a $(1+O(\varepsilon))$-approximation in terms of the $\ell_2$ Wasserstein distance. Our main result shows that the posterior distribution of Bayesian linear regression is approximated up to a small error depending on only an $\varepsilon$-fraction of its defining parameters. This holds when using arbitrary Gaussian priors or the degenerate case of uniform distributions over $\mathbb{R}^d$ for $\beta$. Our empirical evaluations involve different simulated settings of Bayesian linear regression. Our experiments underline that the proposed method is able to recover the regression model up to small error while considerably reducing the total running time

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Power consumption is a dominant and still growing cost factor in data centers. In time periods with low load, the energy consumption can be reduced by powering down unused servers. We resort to a model introduced by Lin, Wierman, Andrew and Thereska [23,24] that considers data centers with identical machines, and generalize it to heterogeneous data centers with d different server types. The operating cost of a server depends on its load and is modeled by an increasing, convex function for each server type. In contrast to earlier work, we consider the discrete setting, where the number of active servers must be integral. Thereby, we seek truly feasible solutions. For homogeneous data centers (d = 1), both the offline and the online problem were solved optimally in [3,4].In this paper, we study heterogeneous data centers with general time-dependent operating cost functions. We develop an online algorithm based on a work function approach which achieves a competitive ratio of 2d + 1 + ϵ for any ϵ > 0. For time-independent operating cost functions, the competitive ratio can be reduced to 2d + 1. There is a lower bound of 2d shown in [5], so our algorithm is nearly optimal. For the offline version, we give a graph-based (1+ϵ )-approximation algorithm. Additionally, our offline algorithm is able to handle time-variable data-center sizes. CCS CONCEPTS• Theory of computation → Online algorithms; Approximation algorithms analysis; Scheduling algorithms; Discrete optimization; • Hardware → Enterprise level and data centers power issues; Switching devices power issues.