Enabling datacenter servers to scale out economically and sustainably
Proceedings of the 46th Annual IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Microarchitecture
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The necessity for capping carbon emission has significantly restricted the potential of modern data centers. For this matter, both industry and academia are proactively seeking opportunities on cross-layer power management schemes that could open a door for sustainable high-performance computing platform. In this paper we investigate an emerging trend in the IT industry: using promising onsite distributed generation (DG) techniques to provide premium clean energy to the computing load. We develop data center power demand shaping (PDS), a novel technique that allows data centers to utilize onsite green energy efficiently. In contrast to prior design, PDS takes advantage of a so-far unexplored power supply feature, i.e., the load following capabilities of DG systems to avoid the high performance penalty issue incurred during supply tracking. In addition, PDS features two adaptive power management schemes: DGR Boost and UPS Boost. These two workload-aware optimization methods leverage mature computer tuning knobs to achieve attractive data center performance improvement. Using real-world data center traces and industry data of distributed generation systems, we show that our technique can come within 1.2% performance of an ideal oracle, which is roughly a 37% improvement over existing supply tracking based design. Our design could save over 100 metric tons of carbon emissions annually for a 10MW data center.