CSR: Small: Leveraging Distributed Generation and Adaptive Energy Storage Management for Efficient and Scale-Out Renewable Powered Data Center Design

计算机系统设计不可避免地进入了可持续性设计领域，因为数据中心的电力足迹已成为全球关注的问题。可再生能源驱动的数据中心在IT行业和学术界越来越受欢迎，作为解决能源短缺和环境问题双重挑战的一种方式。这个项目的目标是探索设计，使计算系统的性能接近各种绿色能源。为了实现这一目标，将利用分布式发电技术。为了支持新兴的数据分析工作负载，这些工作负载往往随着大量计算节点而很好地扩展，现代数据中心不断地添加计算资源（即，扩展到其现有站点。该项目的另一个目标是探索如何在高效率和低开销的情况下，使功率受限的数据中心能够优雅地扩展，同时降低碳足迹。该项目协同整合了清洁和可再生能源以及新的硬件和软件支持，为新一类的绿色和可持续的云和大数据计算打开了大门。它有助于利用新兴的智能电网技术最有效地利用可再生能源，以应对当今IT行业面临的巨大“电力墙”挑战。此外，该项目极大地有助于使云数据中心以可持续和经济的方式满足横向扩展的要求，从而使许多实际应用受益。该项目还通过使代表性不足的群体参与进来、为教育和培训传播研究基础设施以及与可再生能源行业的外联来为社会做出贡献。

Computer system design inevitably enters the landscape of design for sustainability as the data center power footprint has become a global concern. Renewable energy powered data centers are gaining growing popularity in both IT industry and academia as a way to tackle the dual challenges of energy shortage and environmental issues. The goal of this project is to explore designs that allow near-oracle performance of computing systems on a variety of green energy resources. To achieve this goal, the distributed generation technology will be leveraged. To support emerging data-analytic workloads that tend to scale well with large number of compute nodes, modern data centers are continually adding computing resources (i.e., scaling out) to their existing sites. Another goal of this project is to explore how to enable a power-constrained data center to gracefully scale out while lowering the carbon footprint with high efficiency and low overhead.This project synergistically integrates the clean and renewable energy and novel hardware and software support and opens the door for a new class of green and sustainable cloud and big data computing. It facilitates to most effectively leverage renewable energy using emerging smart grid technologies to tackle the grand "Power Wall" challenges faced in today's IT industries. In addition, this project greatly contributes to enabling cloud data centers to meet the scale-out requirement in both sustainable and economical ways and hence benefits numerous real-life applications. This project also contributes to society through engaging under-represented groups, research infrastructure dissemination for education and training, and outreach to renewable energy industries.