Collaborative Research: DESC: Type I: A User-Interactive Approach to Water Management for Sustainable Data Centers: From Water Efficiency to Self-Sufficiency

在日益普遍的特大干旱和全球淡水供应挑战中，数据中心的大量水足迹使其成为实现水可持续性的集体努力中至关重要和有价值的参与者。因此，必须采用新的数据中心管理方法，明确地将水足迹作为可持续性度量。然而，现有的数据中心用水效率研究只是将用户的计算需求作为一个外部的、不可控的输入，用户完全不知道他们的水足迹。这不仅错过了用户侧需求管理的重要机会，而且还阻止了具有环保意识的用户主动利用他们的工作负载灵活性来促进数据中心水资源的可持续性。为了克服这一限制，弥合数据中心运营商和用户之间的差距，该项目提出了一种新的用户交互数据中心水管理方法，用户可以清楚地看到他们细粒度的水足迹，从而为水的可持续性做出积极贡献。具体而言，该项目开发：(1)在用户和设施层面为数据中心建立公平准确的水会计系统；(2)可扩展的用户交互资源管理方法，提取用户调度灵活性以实现水的可持续性；(3)利用雨水收集等替代水源实现数据中心水资源自给自足的高效在线算法。该项目有助于实现计算机环境可持续性设计（DESC）计划的几个关键目标。它使具有环保意识的云能够利用用户的工作负载调度灵活性，并通过开发新的用户级可持续性指标，提供对用户数字存在的水足迹的无与伦比的可见性。这些见解可以鼓励和增强新一代可持续发展意识用户的能力，并推动数字基础设施提供商调整和加强其业务实践，以符合环境可持续性目标。此外，通过减轻淡水资源和公用事业的压力，该项目有助于干旱易发地区的水资源保护工作和环境复原力。为了增加这个项目的广泛影响，开发的工具和产品将公开分享，并纳入现有课程。最后，本项目通过让女性、STEM中未被充分代表的少数群体和残疾人参与进来，积极促进包容性和多样性，营造一个协作和包容的研究环境。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

Amid the increasingly common megadroughts and global freshwater supply challenges, the massive water footprint of data centers makes them a critical and valuable player in the collective effort toward water sustainability. As such, it is imperative to adopt new approaches for data center management that explicitly address the water footprint as a sustainability metric. Nonetheless, existing research on data center water efficiency only takes users' compute demands as an external and uncontrollable input, keeping users entirely agnostic to their water footprint. This not only misses a significant opportunity for user-side demand management but also prevents environmentally conscious users from proactively exploiting their workload flexibility to contribute to data center water sustainability. To overcome this limitation and bridge the gap between data center operators and users, this project proposes a new user-interactive approach to data center water management, where users are provided with clear visibility of their fine-grained water footprints that enable their active contribution to water sustainability. Specifically, this project develops: (1) a fair and accurate water accounting system for data centers both at the user and facility levels; (2) a scalable user-interactive resource management approach that extracts users' scheduling flexibilities for water sustainability; and (3) an efficient online algorithm that achieves data center water self-sufficiency by leveraging alternative water sources such as rainwater harvesting.This project contributes to several key goals of the Design for Environmental Sustainability in Computing (DESC) program. It enables environmentally conscious clouds to tap into users' workload scheduling flexibility and offers unparalleled visibility into the water footprint of a user's digital presence by developing new user-level sustainability metrics. These insights can encourage and empower a new generation of sustainability-aware users and drive digital infrastructure providers to adapt and enhance their business practices to align with environmental sustainability objectives. Additionally, by alleviating the stress on freshwater sources and utilities, this project contributes to water conservation efforts and environmental resilience in drought-prone regions. To increase the widespread impact of this project, the tools and products developed will be shared publicly and integrated into existing curricula. Finally, this project actively promotes inclusivity and diversity by involving women, underrepresented minority groups in STEM, and persons with disabilities, fostering a collaborative and inclusive research environment.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.