Abstract
To mitigate climate change, we must reduce carbon emissions from hyperscale cloud computing. We find that cloud compute servers cause the majority of emissions in a generalpurpose cloud. Thus, we motivate designing carbon-efficient compute server SKUs, or GreenSKUs, using recently-available lowcarbon server components. To this end, we design and build three GreenSKUs using low-carbon components, such as energy-efficient CPUs, reused old DRAM via CXL, and reused old SSDs.
We detail several challenges that limit GreenSKUs’ carbon savings at scale and may prevent their adoption by cloud providers. To address these challenges, we develop a novel methodology and associated framework, GSF (GreenSKU Framework), that enables a cloud provider to systematically evaluate a GreenSKU’s carbon savings at scale. We implement GSF within Microsoft Azure’s production constraints to evaluate our three GreenSKUs’ carbon savings. Using GSF, we show that our most carbon-efficient GreenSKU reduces emissions per core by 28% compared to currently-deployed cloud servers. When designing GreenSKUs to meet applications’ performance requirements, we reduce emissions by 15%. When incorporating overall data center overheads, our GreenSKU reduces Azure’s net cloud emissions by 8%.
Akshitha Sriraman
Assistant Professor
I am an Assistant Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Carnegie Mellon University. My research bridges computer architecture and software systems, with a focus on making datacenter-scale web systems more efficient, sustainable, and equitable (via solutions that span the systems stack).