PUE or GPUE: A Carbon-Aware Metric for Data Centers

Abstract

Greening Information and Communication Tech-nology (ICT) sector is extensively undertaken globally. Metrics were announced to control ICT impacts. For example, Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) metric was developed to report the effectiveness of consumed power in the data center. Consequently, researchers and developers produced several prototypes and implementations on green data centers and they claimed the accuracy of their solutions with wrongly understood metrics. In this paper, we review PUE metric and its green extension (GPUE), in addition to a review of green determinants on data centers. Then, we demonstrated the application of PUE and GPUE in a modern and recent green data center (the Parasol data center). Our demonstration showed the impact of Parasol data center, and reveal insights on how to improve the carbon footprints of the data center.