A Novel Prediction Setup for Online Speed-Scaling

Given the rapid rise in energy demand by data centers and computing systemsin general, it is fundamental to incorporate energy considerations whendesigning (scheduling) algorithms. Machine learning can be a useful approach inpractice by predicting the future load of the system based on, for example,historical data. However, the effectiveness of such an approach highly dependson the quality of the predictions and can be quite far from optimal whenpredictions are sub-par. On the other hand, while providing a worst-caseguarantee, classical online algorithms can be pessimistic for large classes ofinputs arising in practice. This paper, in the spirit of the new area of machine learning augmentedalgorithms, attempts to obtain the best of both worlds for the classical,deadline based, online speed-scaling problem: Based on the introduction of anovel prediction setup, we develop algorithms that (i) obtain provably lowenergy-consumption in the presence of adequate predictions, and (ii) are robustagainst inadequate predictions, and (iii) are smooth, i.e., their performancegradually degrades as the prediction error increases.<br