SustainCluster: Benchmarking Dynamic Multi-Objective Geo-Distributed Workload Management for Sustainable Data Center Cluster
Antonio Guillen-Perez, Avisek Naug, Vineet Gundecha, Sahand Ghorbanpour, Ricardo Luna Gutierrez, Ashwin Ramesh Babu, Munther Salim, Shubhanker Banerjee, Eoin Essink, Damien Fay, Soumyendu Sarkar
The escalating energy demands and carbon footprint of large-scale AI necessitate intelligent workload management across globally distributed data centers. However, developing and evaluating sustainable scheduling strategies is hindered by the lack of benchmarks that realistically capture the complex interplay of time-varying environmental factors (grid carbon intensity, electricity price, weather variations), detailed data center physics (including CPUs, GPUs, memory, and crucial HVAC energy consumption), and geo-distributed network dynamics (costs and latency). To address this critical gap, we introduce SustainCluster: an open-source, high-fidelity simulation benchmark environment designed for research in sustainable, geo-temporal task scheduling. SustainCluster integrates curated, real-world datasets covering AI workload traces, grid carbon intensity, electricity price, weather data for over 20 global regions, cloud transmission costs, and empirical network delay parameters with physics-informed models of data center operations. It presents a challenging scheduling problem where a top-level coordinating agent must reassign or defer dynamically arriving tasks with resource and SLA requirements across a configurable cluster of data centers to optimize multiple objectives. The environment also supports additional components like heat recovery. SustainCluster features a modular reward system enabling explicit study of trade-offs such as carbon emissions, energy cost, SLA, and water usage, and provides a Gymnasium API with baseline controllers such as Reinforcement Learning and rule-based examples, facilitating reproducible machine learning research and fair comparison of diverse scheduling algorithms. By offering a realistic, configurable, and accessible testbed, SustainCluster aims to accelerate the development and validation of next-generation sustainable computing solutions for distributed data centers.