1. An application processing system for placing applications and their associated data into a colocation data center, the application processing system comprising: a memory; a processor communicatively coupled to the memory; and an application placement module communicatively coupled to the memory and the processor, wherein the application placement module is configured to perform a method for placing applications and their associated data into a data center, the steps of a method comprising: constructing a facility communication node graph; constructing a composite elastic map which represents compute nodes in the colocation data center; associating a force function between two nodes based on communication bandwidth; constructing an application usage data space; inserting the facility communication node graph into the application data space; assigning the applications to the compute nodes; associating a force function between each application and each compute node based on the assignment; determining an elastic map energy (EME) for the composite elastic map, wherein the EME is the total energy of the compute nodes; assigning real-world applications to real-world compute nodes in the data center if the EME is less than a threshold energy; and constructing a decision module, wherein when a benefit threshold is reached within a threshold cost by one of a fictitious node configuration the decision module automatically powering on or off the compute nodes in the data center.