Energy Aware Grid: Global Workload Placement Based on Energy Efficiency

Computing will be pervasive, and enablers of pervasive computing will be data centers housing computing, networking and storage hardware. The data center of tomorrow is envisaged as one containing thousands of single board computing systems deployed in racks. A data center, with 1000 racks, over 30,000 square feet, would require 10 MW of power to power the computing infrastructure. At this power dissipation, an additional 5 MW would be needed by the cooling resources to remove the dissipated heat. At $100/MWh, the cooling alone would cost $4 million per annum for such a data center. The concept of Computing Grid, based on coordinated resource sharing and problem solving in dynamic, multi-institutional virtual organizations, is emerging as the new paradigm in distributed and pervasive computing for scientific as well as commercial applications. We envision a global network of data centers housing an aggregation of computing, networking and storage hardware. The increased compaction of such devices in data centers has created thermal and energy management issues that inhibit sustainability of such a global infrastructure. In this paper, we propose the framework of Energy Aware Grid that will provide a global utility infrastructure explicitly incorporating energy efficiency and thermal management among data centers. Designed around an energy-aware co-allocator, workload placement decisions will be made across the Grid, based on data center energy efficiency coefficients. The coefficient, evaluated by the data center’s resource allocation manager, is a complex function of the data center thermal management infrastructure and the seasonal and diurnal variations. A detailed procedure for implementation of a test case is provided with an estimate of energy savings to justify the economics. An example workload deployment shown in the paper aspires to seek the most energy efficient data center in the global network of data centers. The locality based energy efficiency in a data center is shown to arise from use of ground coupled loops in cold climates to lower ambient temperature for heat rejection e.g. computing and rejecting heat from a data center at nighttime ambient of 20°C. in New Delhi, India while Phoenix, USA is at 45°C. The efficiency in the cooling system in the data center in New Delhi is derived based on lower lift from evaporator to condenser. Besides the obvious advantage due to external ambient, the paper also incorporates techniques that rate the efficiency arising from internal thermo-fluids behavior of a data center in workload placement decision.Copyright © 2003 by ASME