Metrics for Sustainability in Data Centers

Abstract

Despite several calls from the community for improving the sustainability of computing, sufficient progress is yet to be made on one of the key prerequisites of sustainable computing---the ability to define and measure computing sustainability holistically. This position paper proposes metrics that aim to measure the end-to-end sustainability footprint in data centers. To enable useful sustainable computing efforts, these metrics can track the sustainability footprint at various granularities---from a single request to an entire data center. The proposed metrics can also broadly influence sustainable computing practices by incentivizing end-users and developers to participate in sustainable computing efforts in data centers.