BEASY: Making EASY Backfilling Renewable-Only

Abstract

Reducing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from Information and Communication Technology (ICT) has become a hot topic since the Paris Agreement. Data centers are one of the most impactful ICT energy consumers since they are built to run 24 hours / 7 days. An emerging discussion is switching their power supply from brown to green energy, using Renewable Energy Sources (RES). However, this change introduces uncertainties linked to production intermittence. This work is part of the Datazero2 project. This project designs a data center powered only by renewable production, adding storage elements to reduce the impact of the intermittence. A clean-by-design data center requires several decisions at different levels of management. To do so, it uses predictions to plan the actions for the next few days. However, it also needs to react to the actual events that can vary from the forecast. This work presents the BEASY heuristic. BEASY mixes power and scheduling decisions in a renewableonly data center, seeking to reduce the number of killed jobs and wasted energy. The results demonstrate that BEASY reduced wasted energy by up to 35.33% in critical cases. Considering the killed jobs, it also kills fewer jobs than the state of art algorithms in all executions.