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Online Resource Management for Carbon-Neutral Cloud Computing

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Handbook on Data Centers

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Abstract

The explosive growth of cloud computing services in recent years has led to significant expansion of data centers around the world and dramatically increased the overall electricity consumption, thereby resulting in a huge carbon footprint and severely impacting environment. As a consequence, data center operators have been increasingly urged to find effective solutions to achieve an overall net zero carbon footprint i.e., carbon neutrality. The state-of-the-art research addresses carbon neutrality based on accurate prediction of long-term future information that is typically unavailable in practice. In this chapter, we propose a provably-efficient online algorithm, called COCA (optimizing for COst minimization and CArbon neutrality), which minimizes the operational cost while satisfying the carbon neutrality without long-term future information a priori and in the presence of time-varying workloads and intermittent renewable energy supplies. We present a trace-based simulation study to validate the effectiveness of COCA, and the results show that COCA can outperform state-of-the-art prediction-based methods in terms of cost saving while achieving carbon neutrality. Moreover, we extend COCA to incorporate geographic load balancing to explore the geo-diversities of data centers for reducing the operational cost.

This chapter is mainly based on the authors’ prior research [1].

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Notes

  1. 1.

    The average at time t in Fig. 3 is obtained by summing up all the values from time 0 to time t and then dividing the sum by t + 1.

  2. 2.

    Lower power per unit service capacity indicates less energy for the same amount of workload served.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Florida International University, Miami, USA

    Kishwar Ahmed & Shaolei Ren

  2. Microsoft Research, Redmond, USA

    Yuxiong He

  3. National Technical University of Athens, Athens, Greece

    Athanasios V. Vasilakos

Authors
  1. Kishwar Ahmed
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  2. Shaolei Ren
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  3. Yuxiong He
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  4. Athanasios V. Vasilakos
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Correspondence to Shaolei Ren .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, North Dakota State University, Fargo, North Dakota, USA

    Samee U. Khan

  2. School of Information Technologies, The University of Sydney, Sydney, New South Wales, Australia

    Albert Y. Zomaya

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Ahmed, K., Ren, S., He, Y., Vasilakos, A. (2015). Online Resource Management for Carbon-Neutral Cloud Computing. In: Khan, S., Zomaya, A. (eds) Handbook on Data Centers. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4939-2092-1_20

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4939-2092-1_20

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