Cutting the electric bill for internet-scale systems
Energy expenses are becoming an increasingly important fraction of data center operating costs. At the same time, the energy expense per unit of computation can vary significantly between two difierent locations. In this paper, we characterize the variation due to fluctuating electricity prices and argue that existing distributed systems should be able to exploit this variation for significant economic gains. Electricity prices exhibit both temporal and geographic variation, due to regional demand difierences, transmission inefficiencies, and generation diversity. Starting with historical electricity prices, for twenty nine locations in the US, and network traffic data collected on Akamai's CDN, we use simulation to quantify the possible economic gains for a realistic workload. Our results imply that existing systems may be able to save millions of dollars a year in electricity costs, by being cognizant of locational computation cost difierences. Copyright 2009 ACM.
Duke Scholars
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- Networking & Telecommunications
- 4606 Distributed computing and systems software
- 4006 Communications engineering
- 1005 Communications Technologies
- 0805 Distributed Computing
- 0803 Computer Software
Citation
Published In
DOI
EISSN
ISSN
Publication Date
Volume
Issue
Start / End Page
Related Subject Headings
- Networking & Telecommunications
- 4606 Distributed computing and systems software
- 4006 Communications engineering
- 1005 Communications Technologies
- 0805 Distributed Computing
- 0803 Computer Software