Exploiting Spatio-Temporal Diversity for Water Saving in Geo-Distributed Data Centers

As the critical infrastructure for supporting Internet and cloud computing services, massive geo-distributed data centers are notorious for their huge electricity appetites and carbon footprints. Nonetheless, a lesser-known fact is that data centers are also “thirsty”: to operate data centers, millions of gallons of water are required for cooling and electricity production. The existing water-saving techniques primarily focus on improved “engineering” (e.g., upgrading to air economizer cooling, diverting recycled/sea water instead of potable water) and do not apply to all data centers due to high upfront capital costs and/or location restrictions. In this paper, we propose a software-based approach towards water conservation by exploiting the inherent spatio-temporal diversity of water efficiency across geo-distributed data centers. Specifically, we propose a batch job scheduling algorithm, called WACE (minimization of WAter, Carbon and Electricity cost), which dynamically adjusts geographic load balancing and resource provisioning to minimize the water consumption along with carbon emission and electricity cost while satisfying average delay performance requirement. WACE can be implemented online without foreseeing the far future information and yields a total cost (incorporating electricity cost, water consumption and carbon emission) that is provably close to the optimal algorithm with lookahead information. Finally, we validate WACE through a trace-based simulation study and show that WACE outperforms state-of-the-art benchmarks: 25 percent water saving while incurring an acceptable delay increase. We also extend WACE to joint scheduling of batch workloads and delay-sensitive interactive workloads for further water footprint reduction in geo-distributed data centers.