학술논문

Carbon-Aware Computing for Datacenters
Document Type
Periodical
Source
IEEE Transactions on Power Systems IEEE Trans. Power Syst. Power Systems, IEEE Transactions on. 38(2):1270-1280 Mar, 2023
Subject
Power, Energy and Industry Applications
Components, Circuits, Devices and Systems
Internet
Carbon
Carbon dioxide
Real-time systems
Load modeling
Computational modeling
Pipelines
Carbon- and efficiency-aware compute manage- ment
datacenter computing
power management
Language
ISSN
0885-8950
1558-0679
Abstract
The amount of CO$_{2}$ emitted per kilowatt-hour on an electricity grid varies by time of day and substantially varies by location due to the types of generation. Networked collections of warehouse scale computers, sometimes called Hyperscale Computing, emit more carbon than needed if operated without regard to these variations in carbon intensity. This paper introduces Google’s system for global Carbon-Intelligent Compute Management, which actively minimizes electricity-based carbon footprint and power infrastructure costs by delaying temporally flexible workloads. The core component of the system is a suite of analytical pipelines used to gather the next day’s carbon intensity forecasts, train day-ahead demand prediction models, and use risk-aware optimization to generate the next day’s carbon-aware Virtual Capacity Curves (VCCs) for all datacenter clusters across Google’s fleet. VCCs impose hourly limits on resources available to temporally flexible workloads while preserving overall daily capacity, enabling all such workloads to complete within a day with high probability. Data from Google’s in-production operation shows that VCCs effectively limit hourly capacity when the grid’s energy supply mix is carbon intensive and delay the execution of temporally flexible workloads to “greener” times.