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

随着数据中心规模的扩大，为服务器群集供电和冷却所消耗的能源已占运营数据中心总拥有成本的很大一部分。因此，减少数据中心的能源和碳足迹以及使用太阳能和风能等绿色能源来运行数据中心的趋势越来越大。在这个项目中，我们将对服务器集群的系统支持进行基础研究，这些服务器集群被设计为使用可变功率运行，例如来自可再生能源的服务器集群。我们将设计一种新的供应端技术来管理数据中心服务器群集的能源和功率占用，并使其适应供应端的波动。我们的解决方案使服务器群集中的计算和数据节点能够实现负载循环，从而使它们的功率和能源消耗能够很好地适应不同的供电曲线。我们将设计研究如何调整分布式存储和服务器虚拟化，以利用服务器的这种负载循环来减少能源消耗。这项工作的更广泛影响包括新的可持续计算研究生研讨会课程，将本科生，特别是来自代表不足的群体的本科生纳入这项研究的夏季REU项目，以及通过可持续发展教程向K-12教师和社区大学教职员工延伸。

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.