A survey on energy efficiency in information systems

Concerns about energy and sustainability are growing everyday involving a wide range of fields. Even Information Systems (ISs) are being influenced by the issue of reducing pollution and energy consumption and new fields are rising dealing with this topic. One of these fields is Green Information Technology (IT), which deals with energy efficiency with a focus on IT. Researchers have faced this problem according to several points of view. The purpose of this paper is to understand the trends and the future development of Green IT by analyzing the state-of-the-art and classifying existing approaches to understand which are the components that have an impact on energy efficiency in ISs and how this impact can be reduced. At first, we explore some guidelines that can help to understand the efficiency level of an organization and of an IS. Then, we discuss measurement and estimation of energy efficiency and identify which are the components that mainly contribute to energy waste and how it is possible to improve energy efficiency, both at the hardware and at the software level

A Survey of Green Networking Research

Reduction of unnecessary energy consumption is becoming a major concern in wired networking, because of the potential economical benefits and of its expected environmental impact. These issues, usually referred to as "green networking", relate to embedding energy-awareness in the design, in the devices and in the protocols of networks. In this work, we first formulate a more precise definition of the "green" attribute. We furthermore identify a few paradigms that are the key enablers of energy-aware networking research. We then overview the current state of the art and provide a taxonomy of the relevant work, with a special focus on wired networking. At a high level, we identify four branches of green networking research that stem from different observations on the root causes of energy waste, namely (i) Adaptive Link Rate, (ii) Interface proxying, (iii) Energy-aware infrastructures and (iv) Energy-aware applications. In this work, we do not only explore specific proposals pertaining to each of the above branches, but also offer a perspective for research.Comment: Index Terms: Green Networking; Wired Networks; Adaptive Link Rate; Interface Proxying; Energy-aware Infrastructures; Energy-aware Applications. 18 pages, 6 figures, 2 table

Green Approach for Joint Management of Geo-Distributed Data Centers and Interconnection Networks

Every time an Internet user downloads a video, shares a picture, or sends an email, his/her device addresses a data center and often several of them. These complex systems feed the web and all Internet applications with their computing power and information storage, but they are very energy hungry. The energy consumed by Information and Communication Technology (ICT) infrastructures is currently more than 4\% of the worldwide consumption and it is expected to double in the next few years. Data centers and communication networks are responsible for a large portion of the ICT energy consumption and this has stimulated in the last years a research effort to reduce or mitigate their environmental impact. Most of the approaches proposed tackle the problem by separately optimizing the power consumption of the servers in data centers and of the network. However, the Cloud computing infrastructure of most providers, which includes traditional telcos that are extending their offer, is rapidly evolving toward geographically distributed data centers strongly integrated with the network interconnecting them. Distributed data centers do not only bring services closer to users with better quality, but also provide opportunities to improve energy efficiency exploiting the variation of prices in different time zones, the locally generated green energy, and the storage systems that are becoming popular in energy networks. In this paper, we propose an energy aware joint management framework for geo-distributed data centers and their interconnection network. The model is based on virtual machine migration and formulated using mixed integer linear programming. It can be solved using state-of-the art solvers such as CPLEX in reasonable time. The proposed approach covers various aspects of Cloud computing systems. Alongside, it jointly manages the use of green and brown energies using energy storage technologies. The obtained results show that significant energy cost savings can be achieved compared to a baseline strategy, in which data centers do not collaborate to reduce energy and do not use the power coming from renewable resources

Sustainable HPC: Modeling, Characterization, and Implications of Carbon Footprint in Modern HPC Systems

The rapid growth in demand for HPC systems has led to a rise in energy consumption and carbon emissions, which requires urgent intervention. In this work, we present a comprehensive framework for analyzing the carbon footprint of high-performance computing (HPC) systems, considering the carbon footprint during both the hardware production and system operational stages. Our work employs HPC hardware component carbon footprint modeling, regional carbon intensity analysis, and experimental characterization of the system life cycle to highlight the importance of quantifying the carbon footprint of an HPC system holistically

SUSTAINABLE AND SLA-SATISFYING TRAFFIC ENGINEERING

A network controller allows clients of the data center to make decisions on how to incorporate green services into their data center usage. A green-aware Service Level Agreement (SLA) map provides insight into the sustainability factors for each node that is used to perform a service for the client. The green-aware SLA map is determined according to an Environment Conscious (EC) metric that quantifies the environmental and sustainability impacts of performing a service at a data center

Resolving data center power bill disputes: the energy-performance trade-offs of consolidation

This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from ACM via http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/2768510.2770933In this paper we challenge the common evaluation practices used for Virtual Machine (VM) consolidation, such as simulation and small testbeds, which fail to capture the fundamental trade-off between energy consumption and performance. We identify a number of over-simplifying assumptions which are typically made about the energy consumption and performance characteristics of modern networked systems. In response, we describe how more accurate models for data-center systems can be designed and used in order to create an evaluation framework that allows the more reliable exploration of the energy-performance trade-off for VM consolidation strategies.This work was jointly supported by by MINECO (grant TEC2014- 55713-R), the EPSRC INTERNET Project EP / H040536/1, and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and the Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL), under contract FA8750-11-C-0249. The views, opinions, and/or findings contained in this article/presentation are those of the author/presenter and should not be interpreted as representing the official views or policies, either expressed or implied, of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency or the Department of Defense