Carbon Management of Multi-Datacenter Based On Spatio-Temporal Task Migration

Abstract

With the massive deployment of geographically distributed data centers (DCs) and the demand surge for cloud services, their high energy consumption and carbon pollution are increasingly problematic. Therefore, mitigating the harmful effects of the carbon footprint of DCs has become a critical challenge. This paper takes the first step toward analyzing the complementary characteristics of global multi-regional renewable energy sources (RES). There is an opportunity to schedule workloads flexibly and track RES to reduce emissions. Integrating DCs and inter-DC network to form a refined emission model for the trade-off between emission cutting effects from scheduling and carbon costs of workload migration, we propose the spatio-temporal task migration mechanism to pursue low carbon in dual-dimension: This paper shifts intensive workloads to locations sufficient in RES at a coarse scale, and adjust the execution time of the workload in response to real-time RES fluctuations at a fine scale. Thus, the emission overage is shifted and offset by RES in a complementary manner; meanwhile, the acceptance of RES is enhanced. Finally, experiments with real-world data show that our method can optimally coordinate demand with RES and mitigate carbon pollution in geographically distributed DCs, and verify the performance and applicability with various-parameter scenarios.