Towards energy-proportional clouds partially powered by renewable energy

Abstract

With the emergence of the Future Internet and the dawning of new IT models such as cloud computing, the usage of data centers (DC), and consequently their power consumption, increase dramatically. Besides the ecological impact, the energy consumption is a predominant criterion for DC providers since it determines the daily cost of their infrastructure. As a consequence, power management becomes one of the main challenges for DC infrastructures and more generally for large-scale-distributed systems. In this paper, we present the EpoCloud prototype, from hardware to middleware layers. This prototype aims at optimizing the energy consumption of mono-site Cloud DCs connected to the regular electrical grid and to renewable-energy sources.

Leveraging Renewable Energy in Edge Clouds for Data Stream Analysis in IoT

“…Each server has limited physical resources in terms of CPU, RAM and ingress bandwidth. We assume that there is no centralized storage system at the edge cloud: each server has its own hard disk [21]. Once the edge cannot satisfy the computational task QoS requirement, it transfers the task to core where sufficient computing resources are available.…”

IT Optimization for Datacenters Under Renewable Power Constraint

“…The study focus on geographical load balancing, and the optimal mix of renewable energy using a concept called "follow the renewables" in which the workload is migrated among datacenters to improve the renewable energy usage. Finally, Beldiceanu et al [4] presents EpoCloud, a prototype aims at optimizing the energy consumption of mono-site cloud datacenters connected to the regular electrical grid and to renewable energy sources, aiming to find the best trade-off between energy cost and QoS degradation using application reconfiguration or jobs suspension along with Vary-On/Vary-Off (VOVO) policy which dynamically turn on/off the computing resources. Sharma et al [12] presents Blink, a way to handle intermittent power constraints activating and deactivating servers.…”

“…Supplying datacenters with clean-to-use renewable energy is therefore essential to help mitigate climate change. The vast majority of cloud provider companies that claim to use green energy supply on their datacenters consider the classical grid, and deploy the solar panels/wind turbines somewhere else and sell the energy to electricity companies [4], which incurs in energy losses when the electricity travels throughout the grid. Even though several efforts have been conducted at the computing level in datacenters partially powered by renewable energy sources, the scheduling considering the variations in the power production without the grid can still be widely explored.…”

Cloud Workload Prediction and Generation Models

“…In our context this approach is more suitable as the specification of the machines of a data center directly involves their CPU capacities and consequently their energy consumption [5]. Moreover, it can help to implement energy-efficient techniques such as CPU over-commitment [4].…”