Enabling Sustainable Cloud Computing with Low-Carbon Server Design

Reducing carbon emissions is a primary goal in many fields. While the top contributing sectors of carbon emissions are heat and electricity production, transportation, and manufacturing, cloud computing servers add a growing percentage of carbon emissions to the existing problem. 

Carnegie Mellon researchers have teamed up with Microsoft researchers to design carbon-efficient compute servers using recently available low-carbon server components. Their work, titled “Designing Cloud Servers for Lower Carbon,” was published in the 2024 International Symposium on Computer Architecture (ISCA), a top computer architecture conference. This paper was recently recognized as an IEEE Micro Top Pick, awarded to the top 12 computer architecture papers published each year.

“To mitigate climate change, we must reduce carbon emissions from hyperscale cloud computing,” says Akshitha Sriraman, assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering and the faculty author on the paper. “We find that cloud compute servers cause the majority of emissions in a general-purpose cloud.”

The team designed carbon-efficient compute server designs, or GreenSKUs, using recently-available low-carbon server components. They designed and built three such carbon-efficient “GreenSKU” servers using low-carbon components, such as energy-efficient CPUs, reused old DRAM via Compute Express Links, and reused old Solid State Drives.

To help cloud developers compare carbon-efficient server design options, this team debuted a systematic methodology called GSF, which is notable as “the first framework for cloud providers to systematically make informed carbon-efficient server design and deployment decisions.” GSF was applied in this research under Microsoft Azure’s production constraints and reduced the platform’s carbon emissions by about 10 percent. Such significant reductions in Azure’s cloud emissions can reduce a substantial amount of global carbon emissions by 2030. 

Their approach’s widespread use can cut ~100 million of the 2.5 billion metric tons of carbon emissions that the cloud is projected to emit by 2030—equivalent to eliminating annual emissions from entire countries like Qatar/Venezuela. These carbon savings are just the beginning. GSF promises even greater savings by enabling the design and evaluation of future green server designs with more advanced carbon-efficient components. 

Jaylen Wang, an electrical and computer engineering Ph.D. candidate, the lead author of this paper, is advised by Sriraman. 

You can read more about the real-world sustainability impact their work has already had here.