Managing Green Datacenters Powered by Hybrid Renewable Energy Systems

The rapidly growing server energy expenditure and the warning of climate change have forced the IT industry to look at datacenters powered by renewable energy. Existing proposals on this issue yield sub-optimal performance as they typically assume certain specific type of renewable energy sources and overlook the benefits of cross-source coordination. This paper takes the first step toward exploring green datacenters powered by hybrid renewable energy systems that include baseload power supply, intermittent power supply, and backup energy storage. We propose GreenWorks, a power management framework for green high-performance computing datacenters powered by renewable energy mix. Specifically, GreenWorks features a hierarchical power coordination scheme tailored to the timing and capacity of different renewable energy sources. Using real datacenter workload traces and renewable power generation data, we show that our scheme allows green datacenters to achieve better design trade-offs.