How to Schedule When You Have to Buy Your Energy

We consider a situation where jobs arrive over time at a data center, consisting of identical speed-scalable processors. For each job, the scheduler knows how much income is lost as a function of how long the job is delayed. The scheduler also knows the fixed cost of a unit of energy. The online scheduler determines which jobs to run on which processors, and at what speed to run the processors. The scheduler’s objective is to maximize profit, which is the income obtained from jobs minus the energy costs. We give a (1+ )-speed O(1)-competitive algorithm, and show that resource augmentation is necessary to achieve O(1)-competitiveness.