Advancing Environmental Sustainability in Data Centers by Proposing Carbon Depreciation Models
<|reference_start|>Advancing Environmental Sustainability in Data Centers by Proposing Carbon Depreciation Models: The rising demand for on-demand, high-performance computing has led to the growth of data centers, which in turn presents both challenges and opportunities for addressing their environmental impact. Traditionally, sustainability efforts in data centers have focused on reducing energy consumption. However, with advancements in energy efficiency and the integration of renewable energy, the role of embodied carbon has become increasingly significant, necessitating a shift in data center provisioning strategies. This paper proposes the use of carbon depreciation models to encourage longer hardware lifecycles in data centers. These models allocate a higher share of embodied carbon to newly provisioned servers, thereby incentivizing the reduction of new server acquisitions for jobs with stringent quality-of-service (QoS) requirements and promoting the extended use of existing servers with largely recovered embodied carbon. Additionally, we argue that both embodied and operational carbon from server idle time should be considered and recovered during active job processing, which supports high utilization rates. Our analysis demonstrates that traditional carbon accounting methods, which favor new hardware under QoS constraints, are counterproductive to sustainability, as they undervalue the carbon impact of older equipment by pricing jobs 25% cheaper on new hardware. Our approach advocates for improved sustainability through our depreciation model, which ensures that jobs on new machines account for more than twice the carbon emissions compared to older machines.<|reference_end|>
@article{ji2024advancing,
    title={Advancing Environmental Sustainability in Data Centers by Proposing
  Carbon Depreciation Models},
    author={Shixin Ji, Zhuoping Yang, Alex K. Jones, Peipei Zhou},
    journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2403.04976},
    year={2024},
    archivePrefix={arXiv},
    eprint={2403.04976},
    primaryClass={cs.DC}
}