SustainDC -- Benchmarking for Sustainable Data Center Control

Machine learning has driven an exponential increase in computational demand, leading to massive data centers that consume significant amounts of energy and contribute to climate change. This makes sustainable data center control a priority. In this paper, we introduce SustainDC, a set of Python environments for benchmarking multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) algorithms for data centers (DC). SustainDC supports custom DC configurations and tasks such as workload scheduling, cooling optimization, and auxiliary battery management, with multiple agents managing these operations while accounting for the effects of each other. We evaluate various MARL algorithms on SustainDC, showing their performance across diverse DC designs, locations, weather conditions, grid carbon intensity, and workload requirements. Our results highlight significant opportunities for improvement of data center operations using MARL algorithms. Given the increasing use of DC due to AI, SustainDC provides a crucial platform for the development and benchmarking of advanced algorithms essential for achieving sustainable computing and addressing other heterogeneous real-world challenges.

A Configurable Pythonic Data Center Model for Sustainable Cooling and ML Integration

There have been growing discussions on estimating and subsequently reducing the operational carbon footprint of enterprise data centers. The design and intelligent control for data centers have an important impact on data center carbon footprint. In this paper, we showcase PyDCM, a Python library that enables extremely fast prototyping of data center design and applies reinforcement learning-enabled control with the purpose of evaluating key sustainability metrics including carbon footprint, energy consumption, and observing temperature hotspots. We demonstrate these capabilities of PyDCM and compare them to existing works in EnergyPlus for modeling data centers. PyDCM can also be used as a standalone Gymnasium environment for demonstrating sustainability-focused data center control.

Sustainability of Data Center Digital Twins with Reinforcement Learning

The rapid growth of machine learning (ML) has led to an increased demand for computational power, resulting in larger data centers (DCs) and higher energy consumption. To address this issue and reduce carbon emissions, intelligent design and control of DC components such as IT servers, cabinets, HVAC cooling, flexible load shifting, and battery energy storage are essential. However, the complexity of designing and controlling them in tandem presents a significant challenge. While some individual components like CFD-based design and Reinforcement Learning (RL) based HVAC control have been researched, there's a gap in the holistic design and optimization covering all elements simultaneously. To tackle this, we've developed DCRL-Green, a multi-agent RL environment that empowers the ML community to design data centers and research, develop, and refine RL controllers for carbon footprint reduction in DCs. It is a flexible, modular, scalable, and configurable platform that can handle large High Performance Computing (HPC) clusters. Furthermore, in its default setup, DCRL-Green provides a benchmark for evaluating single as well as multi-agent RL algorithms. It easily allows users to subclass the default implementations and design their own control approaches, encouraging community development for sustainable data centers. Open Source Link: https://github.com/HewlettPackard/dc-rl

Robustness and Visual Explanation for Black Box Image, Video, and ECG Signal Classification with Reinforcement Learning

We present a generic Reinforcement Learning (RL) framework optimized for crafting adversarial attacks on different model types spanning from ECG signal analysis (1D), image classification (2D), and video classification (3D). The framework focuses on identifying sensitive regions and inducing misclassifications with minimal distortions and various distortion types. The novel RL method outperforms state-of-the-art methods for all three applications, proving its efficiency. Our RL approach produces superior localization masks, enhancing interpretability for image classification and ECG analysis models. For applications such as ECG analysis, our platform highlights critical ECG segments for clinicians while ensuring resilience against prevalent distortions. This comprehensive tool aims to bolster both resilience with adversarial training and transparency across varied applications and data types.

Carbon Footprint Reduction for Sustainable Data Centers in Real-Time

As machine learning workloads significantly increase energy consumption, sustainable data centers with low carbon emissions are becoming a top priority for governments and corporations worldwide. This requires a paradigm shift in optimizing power consumption in cooling and IT loads, shifting flexible loads based on the availability of renewable energy in the power grid, and leveraging battery storage from the uninterrupted power supply in data centers, using collaborative agents. The complex association between these optimization strategies and their dependencies on variable external factors like weather and the power grid carbon intensity makes this a hard problem. Currently, a real-time controller to optimize all these goals simultaneously in a dynamic real-world setting is lacking. We propose a Data Center Carbon Footprint Reduction (DC-CFR) multi-agent Reinforcement Learning (MARL) framework that optimizes data centers for the multiple objectives of carbon footprint reduction, energy consumption, and energy cost. The results show that the DC-CFR MARL agents effectively resolved the complex interdependencies in optimizing cooling, load shifting, and energy storage in real-time for various locations under real-world dynamic weather and grid carbon intensity conditions. DC-CFR significantly outperformed the industry standard ASHRAE controller with a considerable reduction in carbon emissions (14.5%), energy usage (14.4%), and energy cost (13.7%) when evaluated over one year across multiple geographical regions.

N-Critics: Self-Refinement of Large Language Models with Ensemble of Critics

We propose a self-correction mechanism for Large Language Models (LLMs) to mitigate issues such as toxicity and fact hallucination. This method involves refining model outputs through an ensemble of critics and the model's own feedback. Drawing inspiration from human behavior, we explore whether LLMs can emulate the self-correction process observed in humans who often engage in self-reflection and seek input from others to refine their understanding of complex topics. Our approach is model-agnostic and can be applied across various domains to enhance trustworthiness by addressing fairness, bias, and robustness concerns. We consistently observe performance improvements in LLMs for reducing toxicity and correcting factual errors.

Benchmark Generation Framework with Customizable Distortions for Image Classifier Robustness

We present a novel framework for generating adversarial benchmarks to evaluate the robustness of image classification models. Our framework allows users to customize the types of distortions to be optimally applied to images, which helps address the specific distortions relevant to their deployment. The benchmark can generate datasets at various distortion levels to assess the robustness of different image classifiers. Our results show that the adversarial samples generated by our framework with any of the image classification models, like ResNet-50, Inception-V3, and VGG-16, are effective and transferable to other models causing them to fail. These failures happen even when these models are adversarially retrained using state-of-the-art techniques, demonstrating the generalizability of our adversarial samples. We achieve competitive performance in terms of net $L_2$ distortion compared to state-of-the-art benchmark techniques on CIFAR-10 and ImageNet; however, we demonstrate our framework achieves such results with simple distortions like Gaussian noise without introducing unnatural artifacts or color bleeds. This is made possible by a model-based reinforcement learning (RL) agent and a technique that reduces a deep tree search of the image for model sensitivity to perturbations, to a one-level analysis and action. The flexibility of choosing distortions and setting classification probability thresholds for multiple classes makes our framework suitable for algorithmic audits.

PyDCM: Custom Data Center Models with Reinforcement Learning for Sustainability

The increasing global emphasis on sustainability and reducing carbon emissions is pushing governments and corporations to rethink their approach to data center design and operation. Given their high energy consumption and exponentially large computational workloads, data centers are prime candidates for optimizing power consumption, especially in areas such as cooling and IT energy usage. A significant challenge in this pursuit is the lack of a configurable and scalable thermal data center model that offers an end-to-end pipeline. Data centers consist of multiple IT components whose geometric configuration and heat dissipation make thermal modeling difficult. This paper presents PyDCM, a customizable Data Center Model implemented in Python, that allows users to create unique configurations of IT equipment with custom server specifications and geometric arrangements of IT cabinets. The use of vectorized thermal calculations makes PyDCM orders of magnitude faster (30 times) than current Energy Plus modeling implementations and scales sublinearly with the number of CPUs. Also, PyDCM enables the use of Deep Reinforcement Learning via the Gymnasium wrapper to optimize data center cooling and offers a user-friendly platform for testing various data center design prototypes.

Joint Path planning and Power Allocation of a Cellular-Connected UAV using Apprenticeship Learning via Deep Inverse Reinforcement Learning

This paper investigates an interference-aware joint path planning and power allocation mechanism for a cellular-connected unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) in a sparse suburban environment. The UAV's goal is to fly from an initial point and reach a destination point by moving along the cells to guarantee the required quality of service (QoS). In particular, the UAV aims to maximize its uplink throughput and minimize the level of interference to the ground user equipment (UEs) connected to the neighbor cellular BSs, considering the shortest path and flight resource limitation. Expert knowledge is used to experience the scenario and define the desired behavior for the sake of the agent (i.e., UAV) training. To solve the problem, an apprenticeship learning method is utilized via inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) based on both Q-learning and deep reinforcement learning (DRL). The performance of this method is compared to learning from a demonstration technique called behavioral cloning (BC) using a supervised learning approach. Simulation and numerical results show that the proposed approach can achieve expert-level performance. We also demonstrate that, unlike the BC technique, the performance of our proposed approach does not degrade in unseen situations.

ECGBERT: Understanding Hidden Language of ECGs with Self-Supervised Representation Learning

In the medical field, current ECG signal analysis approaches rely on supervised deep neural networks trained for specific tasks that require substantial amounts of labeled data. However, our paper introduces ECGBERT, a self-supervised representation learning approach that unlocks the underlying language of ECGs. By unsupervised pre-training of the model, we mitigate challenges posed by the lack of well-labeled and curated medical data. ECGBERT, inspired by advances in the area of natural language processing and large language models, can be fine-tuned with minimal additional layers for various ECG-based problems. Through four tasks, including Atrial Fibrillation arrhythmia detection, heartbeat classification, sleep apnea detection, and user authentication, we demonstrate ECGBERT's potential to achieve state-of-the-art results on a wide variety of tasks.