The UCSD/Calit2 GreenLight Project (Invited Paper)

Abstract

The information technology (IT) industry has recently been estimated to have the same carbon footprint (that is, energy consumption) as the airline industry. Airlines have invested heavily for decades in more efficient engines, lighter airplanes and optimized scheduling to save energy consumption. Meanwhile, the energy usage per compute server rack has grown from about 2 kW/rack in 2000 to an estimated 30 kW/rack in 2010, to the point where the cooling and power issues are now a major factor in system design. In the last several years, the IT industry has begun to develop new strategies for "greening" traditional data centers, yet the physical reality of modern university campus Cyberlnfrastructure (CI) is a complex network of ad hoc and sub-optimal energy environments housed in departmental facilities. But because the value of computational and data-intensive approaches to research is increasingly embraced, this number of departmental facilities is swelling fast and creating campus-wide crises of space, power, and cooling.