Parasol:A Solar-Powered µDatacenter

Íñigo Goiri

Ricardo Bianchini, Thu D. Nguyen

Team: Josep Lluis Berral, Md Haque, Bill Katsak, Kien Le

Department of Computer Science

What’s the problem?

Climate change directly related to CO2 emissions ICT industry footprint = Aviation

Will double until 2020 Our focus so far: Data centers

Found in enterprises, universities, Internet services Energy consumption translates into high operational cost Energy consumption (indirectly) releases CO2 into the air

ICT = Information and Communication Technology [Climate Group’08]

Nigeria DCs Czech Rep.

0

20

40

60

80

100

120

14035th 34th

MM

T/ye

ar

2000 2005 20100

30

60

90

120

150

180

210

240

270

Billi

on K

Wh/

year

Impact of data centers

Electricity usage of worldwide DCs [JK’11]

CO2 of worldwide DCs [Mankoff’08]

1.5%

Mega data center

Microsoft DC in Quincy, WA

Mega data center

Microsoft DC in Chicago, IL

Small data center

Small and medium data centers dominate

What’s the solution?

Reduce footprint by leveraging renewable energy

Bring solar and/or wind Co-location

Self-generation

Small and medium data centers

Solar and wind are clean

Wind (o

ff-shore)

Hydroele

ctric

Wind (o

n-shore)

Biogas

Solar

therm

al

Biomass

Solar

PV

Geotherm

al

Nuclear

Natural

gas

Diesel

Heavy

oilCoal

0100200300400500600700800900

1000

g CO

2e p

er K

Wh

over

life

time

[Sovacool’08]

Solar is more available than wind in the US

Wind Solar

[NREL’12]

Main challenge: Supply of power is variable!

Solar power

We need to match the energy demand to the supply

Workload

Now

Solar-powered computing On/off grid

Software to exploit renewables within and across DCs Tradeoff between

Renewables Batteries Grid energy

Addressing the challenge with ParasolPo

wer

(kW

)

Time

SolarAvailable

April’12December’10

Parasol inside and outside

The Rutgers Parasol Project

http://parasol.cs.rutgers.edu