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Coordinating workload balancing and power switching in renewable energy powered data center

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Abstract

There has been growing concern about energy consumption and environmental impact of datacenters. Some pioneers begin to power datacenters with renewable energy to offset carbon footprint. However, it is challenging to integrate intermittent renewable energy into datacenter power system. Grid-tied system is widely deployed in renewable energy powered datacenters. But the drawbacks (e.g. Harmonic disturbance and costliness) of grid tie inverter harass this design. Besides, the mixture of green load and brown load makes powermanagement heavily depend on software measurement and monitoring, which often suffers inaccuracy. We propose DualPower, a novel power provisioning architecture that enables green datacenters to integrate renewable power supply without grid tie inverters. To optimize DualPower operation, we propose a specially designed power management framework to coordinate workload balancing with power supply switching. We evaluate three optimization schemes (LM, PS and JO) under different datacenter operation scenarios on our trace-driven simulation platform. The experimental results show that DualPower can be as efficient as grid-tied system and has good scalability. In contrast to previous works, DualPower integrates renewable power at lower cost and maintains full availability of datacenter servers.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. State Key Laboratory of Software Development Environment, Beihang University, Beijing, 100191, China

    Xian Li & Rui Wang

  2. School of Computer Science and Engineering, Beihang University, Beijing, 100191, China

    Xian Li, Rui Wang, Zhongzhi Luan, Yi Liu & Depei Qian

Authors
  1. Xian Li
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  2. Rui Wang
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  3. Zhongzhi Luan
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  4. Yi Liu
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  5. Depei Qian
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Rui Wang.

Additional information

Xian Li received his BS in School of Computer and Communication Engineering, University of Science and Technology Beijing, China and his MS in School of Computer Science and Engineering, Beihang University, China. He has worked in the areas of computer architecture and renewable energy powered data centers.

Rui Wang is an assistant professor in School of Computer Science and Engineering, Beihang University, China. He received his BS and MS in computer science from Xi’an Jiaotong University, China, in 2000 and 2003, respectively; and his PHD in computer science from Beihang University, China in 2009. His research interests include computer architecture and computer networks. He is a member of IEEE and China Computer Federation.

Zhongzhi Luan is an associate professor of School of Computer Science and Engineering, and assistant director of the Sino-German Joint Software Institute at Beihang University, China. In 2003, he completed PhD in Department of Computer Science of Xi’an Jiaotong University, China. He has been involved into more than 15 scientific projects mostly as project leader or the backbone of the researchers. He is now in charge of the international data placement testbed project which is funded by international cooperation program of National Science Foundation of China, China. His research interests include distributed computing, parallel computing, grid computing, HPC and new generation of network technology.

Yi Liu received his BS, MS and PhD degrees in computer science from Xi’an Jiaotong University, China in 1990, 1993 and 2000, respectively. Currently he is a professor in Beihang University, China, and vice director of Sino-German Joint Software Institute in Beihang University. His research interests include computer architecture and high performance computing.

Depei Qian is a professor at the Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Beihang University, China. He received his MS from University of North Texas, USA, in 1984. He is currently serving as the chief scientist of China National High Technology Program (863 Program) on high productivity computer and service environment. He is also a fellow of China Computer Federation (CCF). His research interests include innovative technologies in distributed computing, high performance computing and computer arcitecture.

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Li, X., Wang, R., Luan, Z. et al. Coordinating workload balancing and power switching in renewable energy powered data center. Front. Comput. Sci. 10, 574–587 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11704-015-5018-9

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11704-015-5018-9

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