Energy-Aware Analytics in the Cloud

Big data is now mostly processed in the cloud and will keep growing, fed by databases and the Internet of Things (IoT: sensors, mobile devices, edge computing). On the other hand, AI is pushing computers and data analysis to limits we had not witnessed before. Analytics in the cloud is now a major fraction of energy consumption, among other less CPU-intensive tasks like web services. With this green computing motivation in mind, we present a survey of past research and a vision of big data analytics in the cloud. Energy consumption is difficult to minimize because it has conflicting correlated variables behind: high performance, money cost and pollution, We identify which software subsystems and hardware components have a higher impact on energy consumption, understanding how they can be tweaked or tuned to optimize energy consumption.