Green Computing: Energy Consumption Optimized Service Hosting

Green Computing is a recent trend towards designing, building, and operating computer systems to be energy efficient. While programs such as Energy Star have been around since the early 1990s, recent concerns regarding global climate change and the energy crisis have led to renewed interest in Green Computing. Data centers are a significant consumers of energy - both to power the computers as well as to provide the necessary cooling. This paper proposes a new approach to reduce energy utilization in data centers. In particular, our approach relies on consolidating services dynamically onto a subset of the available servers and temporarily shutting down servers in order to conserve energy. We present initial work on a probabilistic service dispatch algorithm that aims at minimizing the number of running servers such that they suffice for meeting the quality of service required by service-level agreements. Given the estimated energy consumption and projected growth in data centers, the proposed effort has the potential to positively impact energy consumption.