Quantum Annealing Method for Dynamic Virtual Machine and Task Allocation in Cloud Infrastructures from Sustainability Perspective

Cloud infrastructures and data centers consume a remarkable amount of natural resources. Previous research has optimized virtual machine allocation to physical machines with respect to power consumption and the number of migrations. Still, power is just a single factor of the total carbon footprint that the data centers produce. In this work, we extend the previous approaches and represent a framework where allocations are based on a sustainability metric. We formalize the task and virtual machine allocation problem as a quadratic unconstrained binary optimization problem that can be solved on D-wave’s quantum annealer.