The emergence of cloud computing has established a trend towards building massive, energy-hungry, and geographically distributed data centers. Due to their enormous energy consumption, data centers are expected to have major impact on the electric grid by significantly increasing the load at locations where they are built. However, data centers and cloud computing also provide opportunities to help the grid with respect to robustness and load balancing. To gain insights into these opportunities, we formulate the service request routing problem in cloud computing jointly with the power flow analysis in smart grid and explain how these problems can be related. Simulation results based on the standard setting in the IEEE 24-bus Reliability Test System show that a grid-aware service request routing design in cloud computing can significantly help in load balancing in the electric grid and making the grid more reliable and more robust with respect to link breakage and load demand variations.
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