Green Server Design: Beyond Operational Energy to Sustainability

 Green Server Design: Beyond Operational Energy to Sustainability Jichuan Chang, Justin Meza, Parthasarathy Ranganathan, Cullen Bash, Amip Shah HP Laboratories HPL-2010-116 Environmental sustainability, energy efficiency, lifecycle analysis "Green" server and datacenter design requires a focus on environmental sustainability. Prior studies have focused on operational energy consumption as a proxy for sustainability, but this metric only captures part of the environmental impact. In this paper, we argue that to understand the total impact, we need to examine the entire lifecycle of the system, beyond operational energy to also include material use and manufacturing. We make two main contributions. We present a methodology that allows such a lifecycle analysis, specifically providing attribution of sustainability bottlenecks to individual system architecture components. Using this methodology, we compare the sustainability tradeoffs between popular energy-efficiency optimizations and discuss sustainability bottlenecks and optimizations for future system designs. External Posting Date: September 21, 2010 [Fulltext] Approved for External Publication Internal Posting Date: September 21, 2010 [Fulltext] To be published in the 2010 Workshop on Power Aware Computing and Systems (HotPower). Copyright The 2010 Workshop on Power Aware Computing and Systems (HotPower), 2010. Green Server Design: Beyond Operational Energy to Sustainability Jichuan Chang, Justin Meza, Parthasarathy Ranganathan, Cullen Bash, Amip Shah Hewlett Packard Labs “Green” server and datacenter design requires a focus on environmental sustainability. Prior studies have focused on operational energy consumption as a proxy for sustainability, but this metric only captures part of the environmental impact. In this paper, we argue that to understand the total impact, we need to examine the entire lifecycle of the system, beyond operational energy to also include material use and manufacturing. We make two main contributions. We present a methodology that allows such a lifecycle analysis, specifically providing attribution of sustainability bottlenecks to individual system architecture components. Using this methodology, we compare the sustainability tradeoffs between popular energy-efficiency optimizations and discuss sustainability bottlenecks and optimizations for future system designs.