Environmentally Opportunistic Computing transforming the data center for economic and environmental sustainability

Abstract

The United States Environmental Protection Agency forecasts the 2011 national IT electric energy expenditure will grow toward $7.4 billion [1]. In parallel to economic IT energy concerns, the general public and environmental advocacy groups are demanding proactive steps toward sustainable green processes. Our contribution to the solution of this problem is Environmentally Opportunistic Computing (EOC). Our Green Cloud EOC prototype serves as an operational demonstration that IT resources can be integrated with the dominate energy footprint of existing facilities and dynamically controlled to balance process throughput, thermal transfer, and available cooling via process management and migration. The Green Cloud is a sustainable computing technology that complements existing efficiency improvements at the application, operating system and hardware levels. Exhaust heat energy is transferred directly to an adjacent greenhouse facility and cooling is provided by free cooling methods. We will describe the architecture and operation of this successful prototype that has led to its growing use in our production environments.