Greening Geographical Load Balancing

Energy expenditure has become a significant fraction of data center operating costs. Recently, "geographical load balancing" has been proposed to reduce energy cost by exploiting the electricity price differences across regions. However, this reduction of cost can paradoxically increase to...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:IEEE/ACM transactions on networking 2015-04, Vol.23 (2), p.657-671
Main Authors: Zhenhua Liu, Minghong Lin, Wierman, Adam, Low, Steven, Andrew, Lachlan L. H.
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Data centers
Data models
Delays
demand response
distributed algorithms
Electricity
geographical load balancing
Load management
Load modeling
renewable energy
Routing
Servers
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Summary:Energy expenditure has become a significant fraction of data center operating costs. Recently, "geographical load balancing" has been proposed to reduce energy cost by exploiting the electricity price differences across regions. However, this reduction of cost can paradoxically increase total energy use. We explore whether the geographical diversity of Internet-scale systems can also provide environmental gains. Specifically, we explore whether geographical load balancing can encourage use of "green" renewable energy and reduce use of "brown" fossil fuel energy. We make two contributions. First, we derive three distributed algorithms for achieving optimal geographical load balancing. Second, we show that if the price of electricity is proportional to the instantaneous fraction of the total energy that is brown, then geographical load balancing significantly reduces brown energy use. However, the benefits depend strongly on dynamic energy pricing and the form of pricing used.
ISSN:1063-6692
1558-2566
DOI:10.1109/TNET.2014.2308295