Aerial computing—security from missile threats and enhancing PUE

Abstract

Data centers have operational challenges due to high cooling costs and the necessity of ensuring physical security to keep data safe. The activities of malicious organizations in countries without sophisticated missile defence systems also necessitate enhancing data center security. The expending of significant power for cooling degrades data center power usage effectiveness (PUE). The use of high altitude platform data centers (HAP-DCs) is proposed to address these challenges. The HAP-DC incorporates a location mechanism which ensures that HAP-DCs have a dynamic location making them difficult targets for aerial missiles. The paper also proposes a stratospheric scheduling mechanism to enhance the HAP-DC’s PUE. The scheduling mechanism ensures that HAP-DCs sited where the stratosphere has best cooling ability are used for workload execution. Analysis shows that the location mechanism enhances safety against missile threats by at least 6.7% and up to 35.4% on average. The scheduling mechanism enhances the PUE by at least 43.8% and up to 81.1% on average.