The massive energy consumption of data centers worldwide has resulted in a large carbon footprint, raising serious concerns to sustainable IT initiatives and attracting a great amount of research attention. Nonetheless, the current efforts to date, despite encouraging, have been primarily centered around owner-operated data centers (e.g., Google data center), leaving out another major segment of data center industry—colocation data centers—much less explored. As a major hindrance to carbon efficiency desired by the operator, colocation suffers from “split incentive”: tenants may not be willing to manage their servers for carbon efficiency. In this paper, we aim at minimizing the carbon footprint of geo-distributed colocation data centers, while ensuring that the operator's cost meets a long-term budget constraint. We overcome the “split incentive” hurdle by devising a novel online carbon-aware incentive mechanism, called $\mathsf {GreenColo}$GreenColo, in which tenants voluntarily bid for energy reduction at self-determined prices and will receive financial rewards if their bids are accepted at runtime. Using trace based simulation we show that $\mathsf {GreenColo}$GreenColo results in a carbon footprint fairly close (23 versus 18 percent) to the optimal offline solution with future information, while being able to satisfy the colocation operator's long-term budget constraint. We demonstrate the effectiveness of $\mathsf {GreenColo}$GreenColo in practical scenarios via both simulation studies and scaled-down prototype experiments. Our results show that $\mathsf {GreenColo}$GreenColo can reduce the carbon footprint by up to 24 percent without incurring any additional cost for the colocation operator (compared to the no-incentive baseline case), while tenants receive financial rewards for “free” without violating service level agreement.

中文翻译：

---

绿色托管数据中心的碳意识激励机制

全球数据中心的大量能源消耗导致了大量的碳足迹，引发了对可持续 IT 计划的严重关注，并引起了大量研究的关注。尽管如此，迄今为止，尽管令人鼓舞，但目前的努力主要集中在业主运营的数据中心（例如 Google 数据中心）上，而忽略了数据中心行业的另一个主要部分——托管数据中心——很少有人探索。作为运营商所期望的碳效率的主要障碍，托管受到“分裂激励”的影响：租户可能不愿意管理他们的服务器以实现碳效率。在本文中，我们旨在最大限度地减少地理分布式托管数据中心的碳足迹，同时确保运营商的成本满足长期预算约束。$\mathsf {GreenColo}$绿色科罗拉多州，其中租户自愿以自行确定的价格投标节能，如果他们的投标在运行时被接受，将获得经济奖励。使用基于跟踪的模拟，我们表明$\mathsf {GreenColo}$绿色科罗拉多州导致碳足迹与具有未来信息的最佳离线解决方案相当接近（23% 对 18%），同时能够满足托管运营商的长期预算约束。我们证明了$\mathsf {GreenColo}$绿色科罗拉多州在实际场景中，通过模拟研究和缩小的原型实验。我们的结果表明$\mathsf {GreenColo}$绿色科罗拉多州 可以将碳足迹减少多达 24%，而不会为托管运营商带来任何额外成本（与无激励基准情况相比），而租户在不违反服务水平协议的情况下“免费”获得经济奖励。