Design and Implementation of Smooth Renewable Power in Cloud Data Centers

The renewable power has been widely used in modern cloud data centers, which also produce large electricity bills and the negative impacts on environments. However, frequent fluctuation and intermittency of renewable power often cause the challenges in terms of the stability of both electricity grid and data centers, as well as decreasing the utilization of renewable power. Existing schemes fail to alleviate the renewable power fluctuation, which is caused by the essential properties of renewable power. In order to address this problem, we propose an efficient and easy-to-use smooth renewable power-aware scheme, called Smoother, which consists of Flexible Smoothing (FS) and Active Delay (AD). First, in order to smooth the fluctuation of renewable power, FS carries out the optimized charge/discharge operation via computing the minimum variance of the renewable power that is supplied to data centers per interval. Second, AD improves the utilization of renewable power via actively adjusting the execution time of deferrable workloads. Extensive experimental results via examining the traces of real-world data centers demonstrate that Smoother significantly reduces the negative impact of renewable power fluctuations on data centers and improves the utilization of renewable power by 250.88 percent on average. We have released the source codes for public use.