A win for game theory in the data center

WHEN YOU HEAR THE WORDS "data center" and "games," you probably think of massive multiplayer online games like World of Warcraft. But there's another kind of game going on in data centers, one meant to hog resources from the shared mass of computers and storage systems. • Even employees of Google, the company with perhaps the most massive data footprint, once played these games. When asked to submit a job's computing requirements, some employees inflated their requests for resources in order to reduce the amount of sharing they'd have to do with others. Interestingly, some other employees deflated their resource requests to pretend that their tasks could easily fit within any computer. Once their tasks were slipped into a machine, those operations would then use up all the resources available on it and squeeze out their colleagues' tasks. • Such trickery might seem a little comical, but it actually points to a real problem-inefficiency. • Globally, data centers consumed 205 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity in 2018. That's not much less than all of Australia used, and about 1 percent of the world total. A lot of that energy is wasted because servers are not used to their full capacity. An idle server dissipates as much as 50 percent of the power it consumes when running at its peak; as the server takes on work, its fixed power costs are amortized over that work. Because a user running a single task typically takes up only 20 to 30 percent of the server's.