Energy adaptive computing for a sustainable ict ecosystem

The goal of the Energy Adaptive Computing (EAC) paradigm is to go beyond energy efficiency and address more directly the issue of sustainability of Information and Computing Technology (ICT). This is done by attempting to reduce the carbon footprint of the infrastructure via two mechanisms in addition to the intelligent energy management: (A) replacing the wide-spread overdesign of the infrastructure components with rightsizing coupled with smart control to handle occasional overshoot in resource — particularly the energy—requirements, and (b) operation on renewable sources of energy. Renewable energy sources often have variable output and also require intelligent adaptation to the energy envelop. After a brief introduction to EAC and the corresponding challenges, we describe the design and implementation of energy adaptation mechanisms for data centers with potentially multiple tiers of service. Energy adaptation is realized by intelligent allocation of energy at various levels of the hierarchy, migration of virtual machines among servers, and shutting down of over—provisioned servers. We study both single and multi—tier systems, and provide detailed evaluation of the proposed adaptation techniques. It is shown that energy adaptation could substantially reduce the energy consumption and yet provide the required quality of service.