Enhancing data center sustainability through Energy-Adaptive Computing

The sustainability concerns of Information Technology (IT) go well beyond energy-efficient computing and require techniques for minimizing environmental impact of IT infrastructure over its entire life-cycle. Traditionally, IT infrastructure is overdesigned at all levels from chips to entire data centers and ecosystem; the paradigm explored in this article is to replace overdesign with rightsizing coupled with smarter control, henceforth referred to as Energy-Adaptive Computing or EAC. The article lays out the challenges of EAC in various environments in terms of the adaptation of the workload and the infrastructure to cope with energy and cooling deficiencies. The article then focuses on implementing EAC in a data center environment, and addresses the problem of simultaneous energy demand and energy supply regulation at multiple levels, work, from servers to the entire data center. The proposed control scheme adapts the assignments of tasks to servers in a way that can cope with the varying energy limitations. The article also presents some experimental results to show how the scheme can continue to meet Quality of Service (QoS) requirements of tasks under energy limitations.