When Green Computing Meets Performance and Resilience SLOs

This paper addresses the urgent need to transition to global net-zero carbon emissions by 2050 while retaining the ability to meet joint performance and resilience objectives. The focus is on the computing infrastructures, such as hyper-scale cloud datacenters, that consume significant power, thus producing increasing amounts of carbon emissions. Our goal is to (1) optimize the usage of green energy sources (e.g., solar energy), which is desirable but expensive and relatively unstable, and (2) continuously reduce the use of fossil fuels, which have a lower cost but a significant negative societal impact. Meanwhile, cloud datacenters strive to meet their customers’ requirements, e.g., service-level objectives (SLOs) in application latency or throughput, which are impacted by infrastructure resilience and availability. We propose a scalable formulation that combines sustainability, cloud resilience, and performance as a joint optimization problem with multiple interdependent objectives to address these issues holistically. Given the complexity and dynamicity of the problem, machine learning (ML) approaches, such as reinforcement learning, are essential for achieving continuous optimization. Our study highlights the challenges of green energy instability which necessitates innovative ML-centric solutions across heterogeneous infrastructures to manage the transition towards green computing. Underlying the ML-centric solutions must be methods to combine classic system resilience techniques with innovations in real-time ML resilience (not addressed heretofore). We believe that this approach will not only set a new direction in the resilient, SLO-driven adoption of green energy but also enable us to manage future sustainable systems in ways that were not possible before.