Leveraging renewable energy in data centers: present and future

Interest has been growing in powering data centers (at least partially) with renewable or "green" sources of energy, such as solar or wind. However, it is challenging to use these sources because, unlike the "brown" (carbon-intensive) energy drawn from the electrical grid, they are not always available. In this keynote talk, I will first discuss the tradeoffs involved in leveraging green energy today and the prospects for the future. I will then discuss the main research challenges and questions involved in managing the use of green energy in data centers. Next, I will describe some of the software and hardware that researchers are building to explore these challenges and questions. Specifically, I will overview systems that match a data center's computational workload to the green energy supply. I will also describe Parasol, the solar-powered micro-data center we have just built at Rutgers University. Finally, I will discuss some potential avenues for future research on this topic.