GeNePi: A Multi-Objective Machine Reassignment Algorithm for Data Centres

Data centres are facilities with large amount of machines (i.e., servers) and hosted processes (e.g., virtual machines). Managers of data centres (e.g., operators, capital allocators, CRM) constantly try to optimise them, reassigning ‘better’ machines to processes. These managers usually see better/good placements as a combination of distinct objectives, hence why in this paper we define the data centre optimisation problem as a multi-objective machine reassignment problem. While classical solutions to address this either do not find many solutions (e.g., GRASP), do not cover well the search space (e.g., PLS), or even cannot operate properly (e.g., NSGA-II lacks a good initial population), we propose GeNePi, a novel hybrid algorithm. We show that GeNePi outperforms all the other algorithms in terms of quantity of solutions (nearly 6 times more solutions on average than the second best algorithm) and quality (hypervolume of the Pareto frontier is 106% better on average).