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.
