Managing Server Clusters on Renewable Energy Mix

Abstract

As climate change has become a global concern and server energy demand continues to soar, many IT companies have started to explore server clusters running on various renewable energy sources. Existing green data center designs often yield suboptimal performance as they only look at a certain specific type of energy source. This article explores data centers powered by hybrid renewable energy systems. We propose GreenWorks, a framework for HPC data centers running on a renewable energy mix. Specifically, GreenWorks features a cross-layer power management scheme tailored to the timing behaviors and capacity constraints of different energy sources. Using realistic workload traces and renewable energy data, we show that GreenWorks could provide a near-optimal workload performance (within 3% difference) on average. It can also reduce the worst-case performance degradation by 43% compared to the state-of-the-art design. Moreover, the performance improvements are based on carbon-neutral operations and are not at the cost of significant efficiency degradation and reduced battery lifecycle. Our technique becomes more efficient when servers become more energy proportional and can effectively handle the ever-increasing depth of renewable power penetration in green data centers.