Algorithms for Sustainable IT

It is now recognized that IT is a significant consumer of energy resources and a substantial source of greenhouse gas pollution. Statistics abound: the Internet produces emissions comparable to the airline industry, an individual server has emissions nearly as large as a car, and IT companies such as Google and Facebook spend millions each month on the electricity bills for their data centers. Perhaps most tellingly, the growth rate of the electricity use of IT in the US is more than 12 times the growth rate of the total US electricity usage.

Consequently, over the last decade a focus on energy-efficient computing has emerged in the computer systems community. This focus has led to dramatic improvements in the energy-efficiency of IT systems. The most celebrated is perhaps the energy efficiency improvement that has been observed in data centers: the Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) of state-of-the-art data centers is now below 1.1, a huge improvement compared to the PUEs of greater than 3 that were standard just a few years ago.

However, the improvements made to date are only the tip of the iceberg. In particular, to date the majority of improvements in energy efficiency have come from improved "engineering" rather than improved "algorithms". Further, the focus has nearly entirely been on reducing the energy costs of computer systems, rather than on making them more sustainable. In contrast, our work focuses on developing algorithms that can help to improve the sustainability of IT (e.g. data centers and communication networks) by facilitating the integration of renewable energy.

The work in RSRG on the design of sustainable IT systems is part of a larger push on sustainability at Caltech led by the Resnick Institute.

Our work so far

Some examples of ongoing projects in RSRG on sustainable IT are below.

In addition to the projects listed above, we are also actively looking into the role IT can play in providing demand response for the grid. This work is in its early stages, but our papers to this point are available here. Also note that a very related project within RSRG focuses on Power Networks and the Smart Grid, and that the work in RSRG on the design of sustainable IT systems is part of a larger push on sustainability at Caltech led by the Resnick Institute.