New framework tackles hidden cost of cloud computing: carbon and grid strain
Researchers have created the first formal model to simultaneously manage carbon emissions, energy costs, and power grid stability across distributed cloud and edge computing systems. The work matters because data centers and edge devices now consume massive electricity—and companies face mounting pressure from regulators and customers to cut emissions while maintaining service quality.
Originaltitel: GreenContinuum: a formal model of a smart grid-aware edge-cloud continuum for carbon and energy management
<p>The Edge-Cloud Continuum is a large-scale, loosely coupled system consisting of multiple stakeholders, regions, dynamic infrastructures, and conflicting objectives. With surging growth and demand, the Continuum’s energy and carbon footprint have massively increased, resulting in great operational expense, environmental impact, and strain on power grids. Methods to mitigate this face significant challenges: Quality of Service (QoS) guarantees must be balanced against not only carbon emissions, but the loadings, capacities, and QoS of the (smart) grids that power the underlying infrastructure. Integrated models to enable reasoning across both a Continuum and its associated SmartGrids are therefore required.</p><p>This work presents a formal model to reason across the integration of Smart Grids and the Edge-Cloud Continuum. Firstly, we identify the components, interactions, and properties crucial to mitigating cross-Continuum energy and carbon footprint while maintaining user, provider, and power grid QoS. We then present associated mathematical models to enable a model-based simulation to be developed based on our work. We present this simulation (all code is available for download) and use a simple scheduling algorithm to demonstrate the feasibility of utilizing knowledge from both the Smart Grid and EdgeCloud Continuum for carbon and energy management, showing that significant savings are possible</p>