Towards Carbon-Aware Container Orchestration: Predicting Workload Energy Consumption with Federated Learning
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The growing reliance on large-scale data centers to run resource-intensive workloads has significantly increased the global carbon footprint, underscoring the need for sustainable computing solutions. While container orchestration platforms like Kubernetes help optimize workload scheduling to reduce carbon emissions, existing methods often depend on centralized machine learning models that raise privacy concerns and struggle to generalize across diverse environments. In this paper, we propose a federated learning approach for energy consumption prediction that preserves data privacy by keeping sensitive operational data within individual enterprises. By extending the Kubernetes Efficient Power Level Exporter (Kepler), our framework trains XGBoost models collaboratively across distributed clients using Flower’s FedXgbBagging aggregation using a bagging strategy, eliminating the need for centralized data sharing. Experimental results on the SPECPower benchmark dataset show that our FL-based approach achieves 11.7% lower Mean Absolute Error compared to a centralized baseline. This work addresses the unresolved trade-off between data privacy and energy prediction efficiency in prior systems such as Kepler and CASPER and offers enterprises a viable pathway toward sustainable cloud computing without compromising operational privacy.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".