CSR: Small: Green Farms: Towards a Stable Energy Optimization Architecture for Data Centers

该奖项是根据2009年美国复苏和再投资法案（公法111-5）资助的。该项目开发了提高具有性能限制的现代数据中心能源效率的技术。同时考虑了计算能量和冷却能量。根据美国环境保护署的数据，美国数据中心每年的能源成本约为45亿美元，相当于580万美国普通家庭的总消耗量。在没有干预的情况下，数据中心的消耗预计将在五年内翻一番。高达80%的预计能源支出是可以避免的，这将使全国二氧化碳排放量每年减少多达4700万公吨（MMT）；相当于一个小国每年所有燃料燃烧的碳排放量。本项目中开发的能源效率解决方案的动机是，服务器安装中单个节能机制的扩散可能导致整体能源管理越来越不理想。问题在于性能的可组合性或缺乏可组合性；这是一个挑战，因为单独的优化在组合时通常不能很好地组合在一起，从而导致了改进的机会。开发了一种理论来定义可组合性的前提条件，并研究了一种整体分布式方法来协调跨计算和冷却子系统的多个组件的节能决策。一门关于信息物理系统的研究生课程旨在涵盖所面临的挑战和解决方案。鼓励妇女和少数民族学生从这些机会中受益。

This award is funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Public Law 111-5).This project develops techniques for increasing energy-efficiency of modern data centers with performance constraints. Both computing and cooling energy are considered. According to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, data centers in the United States incur an annual energy cost of approximately $4.5 billion, which is comparable to the total consumption of 5.8 million average US households. In the absence of intervention, data center consumption is expected to double in five years. Up to 80% of this projected energy expenditure is avoidable, which constitutes a prospective reduction in nationwide carbon dioxide emissions by up to 47 million metric tons (MMT) per year; an amount comparable to the annual carbon emissions footprint of all fuel combustion in a small nation. The observation motivating the energy-efficiency solutions developed in this project is that the proliferation of individual energy-saving mechanisms in server installations can lead to increasingly suboptimal overall energy management. The problem lies in performance composability or lack thereof; a challenge that arises because individual optimizations generally do not compose well when combined, leading to opportunities for improvement. A theory is developed to define preconditions of composability and a holistic distributed approach is investigated for coordinating energy-saving decisions across multiple components that span both the computing and cooling subsystems. A graduate course on cyber-physical systems is designed to cover the addressed challenges and solutions. Women and minority students are encouraged to benefit from these opportunities.