As data centers proliferate, researchers look for ways to limit environmental impact
Laura Hautala, IEEE Spectrum.org, November 14, 2024
Servers consume a lot of energy in data centers, but it’s easy to forget their carbon footprints begin before they’re ever placed on racks inside air-conditioned mega-warehouses. After all, it takes energy to extract minerals and manufacture them into things like processors, motherboards and memory modules.
These “embodied” carbon emissions are a target of research by computer scientists at Carnegie Mellon University, Microsoft, and the University of Washington, who created and tested prototype servers they call GreenSKUs designed to run in the Azure cloud service environment. (SKU refers to a stock keeping unit, which is how the hardware world sometimes refers to physical products.) In a paper presented at the Annual International Symposium on Computer Architecture in June and July, the researchers describe a method for identifying older components that can be re-used in servers without affecting operations.
That’s important, because there’s currently a lot of components taken out of commission when they’ve still got some life in them, says Ashkitha Sriraman, a computer science professor at Carnegie Mellon who was involved in the research. “Very frequently, if one component goes bad or is not efficient, the entire server goes waste,” she says.
To optimize the refurbished servers further, the researchers are looking to software. In a paper presented on 3 November at the HotInfra conference, the researchers discussed their ongoing efforts to add a software layer that plans which compute tasks to run on the GreenSKUs versus standard Azure servers based on performance needs.
The reused components are 4th and 5th generation RAM modules, as well as solid state drives, all of which come from previously used servers that are no longer operational. In addition to these reused parts, the GreenSKUs rely on a more energy efficient processor, eliminating some of the emissions tied to running the server.
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