Energy-efficient Management of Data Centers using a Renewable-aware Scheduler

Leveraging on-site renewable sources like solar and wind provides ample opportunities on developing environmental friendly and energy-efficient data centers. Evidence shows that renewable-aware job schedulers conserve energy by adjusting the arrangement of non-urgent workload according to renewable energy states. We propose an energy management system with a renewable-aware scheduler called REDUX3, which offers a smart way of managing the energy supply of data centers powered by the grid and renewable energy. Due to the intermittent nature of renewable energy resources, REDUX3 judiciously back-fills workload when renewable energy is sufficient, and defer workload to the next time slot if renewable energy is at outage state. As an integrated and smarter update from our previous work [1], [2] and [3], REDUX3 also orchestrates distribute UPS devices (i.e., recharge or discharge) to allocate energy resources when (1) grid price is at low or high states or (2) renewable energy generation is at a low or fluctuating level. Compared with the existing strategies, REDUX3 demonstrates a prominent capacity of boosting renewable energy utilization.