CAREER: Coordinated Power Management in Colocation Data Centers

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CAREER: Coordinated Power Management in Colocation Data CentersThis project focuses on optimizing power management in colocation data centers, which provide facility support to multiple tenants that manage their own servers in shared space. As an integral segment of data center industry supporting the exploding information technology demand, multi-tenant colocation data centers have been massively expanding in both number and scale. The significant concerns are both growing operational costs and environmental issues. Nonetheless, the existing energy-efficiency efforts have been dominantly focused on owner-operated data centers, like Google, whose operators have full and coordinated control over both computing resources and facilities, and hence they are not applicable for colocation data centers in which individual tenants manage their own servers and power consumption in a non-coordinated manner. Consequently, colocation data centers are far behind state-of-the-art owner-operated data centers in energy efficiency and sustainability, which, if left unaddressed, is a major hurdle for sustainable growth in digital economy.To achieve energy sustainability in colocation data centers, this project proposes novel market-based approaches to coordinate individual tenants' power management, in concert with optimizing colocation operator's own server management and non-IT control (e.g., cooling system). This project investigates three complementary research thrusts: (i) Holistically optimizing colocation operator's facility management and economic incentives offered to tenants for energy saving, to limit the usage of carbon-intensive electricity; (ii) Enabling colocation data center demand response to minimize colocation operator's operating cost, increase the adoption of renewable energy, and enhance the power grid reliability; and (iii) Experimentation and validation based on combined software simulation, system prototyping, and real-world implementation.As part of the collaborative efforts from both industry and academia to enable sustainable computing, this project uniquely extends the exploration of power management from owner-operated data centers to multi-tenant colocation data centers. This project can catalyze a shift in future data center management and transform the way that the digital economy evolves, bearing great economic, environmental and societal impacts. This project also contains a significant educational component and provides broad opportunities to attract a diverse population of students to engage in computer science.