Data Center Resource Usage Forecasting with Convolutional Recurrent Neural Networks

Abstract

Energy efficiency, scalability, and reliability are increasingly important for sustainable data centers. In this paper, we focus on forecasting real-world resource usage using neural network time series models, specifically utilizing convolutional recurrent long short-term Memory (LSTM) and gated recurrent unit (GRU) architectures. In our analysis, we compare LSTM and GRU in terms of forecasting accuracy and computational complexity during model training. We demonstrate that recurrent neural networks are more accurate and robust compared to the traditional autoregressive integrated moving average (ARIMA) time series model in this complex forecasting problem. GRU achieved a 9% reduction and LSTM a 5% reduction in forecasting mean squared error (MSE) compared to ARIMA. Furthermore, the GRU architecture with a 1D convolution layer outperforms LSTM architecture in both forecast accuracy and training time. The proposed model can be effectively applied to load forecasting as part of a data center computing cluster. In this application, the proposed GRU architecture has 25% fewer trainable parameters in the recurrent layer than the commonly used LSTM.