The Research


This research is part of an ongoing research conducted by Dr. Stewart at The Ohio State University

Large cloud-computing datacenters now host a wide range of business applications, ranging from e-commerce websites to search engines to data mining. Increasingly, these datacenters use renewable energy from wind turbines or solar panels to reduce their dependence on costly and less clean energy from the grid. But sometimes renewable are intermittently unavailable, long sleeps may miss opportunities
to use them. Such intermittency makes it hard for datacenters to use renewables effectively. For example, windy nights that follow calm afternoons would produce renewables only during traditionally light workload times for datacenters.

As systems researchers, we believe that coordinated resource management could help datacenters use clean renewable energy. Our agenda compliments ongoing efforts to integrate renewables into the grid. We believe that the unique characteristics of datacenter workloads have the opportunity to further reduce their dependence on nonrenewable energy.