A Carbon Aware Incentive Mechanism for Greening Colocation Data Centers in Java

Abstract:

The massive energy consumption of data centers worldwide has resulted in a large carbon footprint, raising serious concerns to sustainable IT initiatives and attracting a great amount of research attention.  onetheless, the current efforts to date, despite encouraging, have been primarily centered around owner-operated data centers (e.g., Google data center), leaving out another major segment of data center industry colocation data centers much less explored. As a major hindrance to carbon efficiency desired by the operator, colocation suffers from “split incentive”: tenants may not be willing to manage their servers for carbon efficiency. In this paper, we aim at minimizing the carbon footprint of geo-distributed colocation data centers, while ensuring that the operator’s cost meets a long-term budget constraint. We overcome the “split incentive” hurdle by devising a novel online carbon-aware incentive mechanism, called GreenColo, in which tenants voluntarily bid for energy reduction at self-determined prices and will receive financial rewards if their bids are accepted at runtime. Using trace based simulation we show that GreenColo results in a carbon footprint fairly close (23% vs 18%) to the optimal offline solution with future information, while being able to satisfy the colocation operator’s long-term budget constraint. We demonstrate the effectiveness of GreenColo in practical scenarios via both simulation studies and scaled-down prototype experiments. Our results show that GreenColo can reduce the carbon footprint by up to 24% without incurring any additional cost for the colocation operator (compared to the no-incentive baseline case), while tenants receive financial rewards for “free” without violating service level agreement.