EAGER: Design and Implementation of a Renewable Adaptive Cluster

Ohio State University, The, Columbus OH

Investigators

Abstract

Datacenters have enriched the planet, making services like e-commerce and web search available to billions. However, the growing carbon footprint of datacenters adds to climate change and, in the long term, could harm society's perception of the whole field. Our ongoing work builds mechanisms for sustainable datacenters, i.e., datacenters that profit while maintaining low carbon footprints. Intellectually, the work contributes new analytic models that relate a datacenter's carbon footprint to its utilization and energy costs. These models must consider complicated issues like solar- and wind-energy outages, heavy-tail and diurnal e-commerce workloads, and workload and energy balancing within datacenters (e.g., dynamically powering servers off and DVFS). Further, the models must be holistic, explaining these factors in terms of profit. In terms of broad impacts, this work will improve the economic competitiveness and sustainability of datacenter-driven computing.