Abstract
Currently, the electricity to run cloud computers is usually generated
from fossil fuels (e.g., petroleum, natural gas), which will cause
carbon pollution. Therefore, data centers, as places to accommodate
cloud computers, are now facing a serious problem of high carbon
pollution. In this letter, an operational method is proposed to achieve
zero-carbon data centers by carefully matching delay tolerant tasks to
computing resources (e.g., CPU) when zero-carbon electricity (wind and
solar energy) is available. We designed a unified measurement called
CPU×Time, by which the complex matching problem involving tasks,
computing resources, and zero-carbon electricity is simplified into a
bin-packing scheduling. Simulations show that the proposed bin-packing
scheduling method can achieve high resource utilization without carbon
pollution.