Green Cloud Computing

Advances in Information and Communications Technology over the last serval decades have transformed computing into the 5th utility, after water, electricity, gas, and telephony. Nowadays, more and more companies and organizations migrate computation workload to cloud, and modern cloud computing platforms become increasingly large-scale and distributed. With such a massive scale cloud computing system, we not only can provide more cost-effective and reliable services but also open the opportunities of improving energy efficiency and lowering carbon footprint for the whole society. Every small improvement would mean a lot.

While the world will need to reach carbon negative, those of us who can afford to move faster and go further should do so. Following this spirit, we have been actively pursuing a sustainable form of cloud computing, Green Cloud Computing, to reduce the energy consumption and cut down carbon emission accordingly. Our current focus lies in three main areas:

• Carbon-aware workload scheduling by adopting the multi-constraint and multi-objective optimization framework.
• Boost resource utilization efficiency to reduce future purchases of hardware so that much energy can be saved during the hardware manufacturing process.
• Optimize device lifespan and recycling by predicting hardware failures and developing management system to fully utilize hardware with different levels of reliability.