CSR: Small: Designing Server Clusters to Handle Variable Solar and Wind Power

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As data centers have increased in size, the energy consumed in powering and cooling server clusters has become a significant fraction of the total cost of ownership of operating a data center. As a result, there is an increasing trend towards reducing the energy and carbon footprint of data centers as well as in using green sources of energy such as solar and wind power to run data centers. In this project, we will conduct fundamental research on system support for server clusters that are designed to run using variable power, such as that from renewable sources. We will design a new supply-side technique to manage the energy and power footprint of a data center server cluster and to adapt this footprint to supply-side fluctuations. Our enables compute and data nodes in a server cluster to be duty-cycled so that their power and energy footprint can be gracefully adapted to a varying supply curve. We will design study how distributed storage and server virtualization can be adapted to exploit such duty-cycling of servers to reduce energy use. The broader impacts of this work include a new graduate seminar course on Sustainable Computing, summer REU projects to include undergraduate students, especially from underrepresented groups, in this research, and outreach to K-12 teachers and community college faculty via tutorials in sustainability.