Peeling Back the Carbon Curtain: Carbon Optimization Challenges in Cloud Computing

Abstract

The increasing carbon emissions from cloud computing requires new methods to reduce its environmental impact. We explore extending data center server lifetimes to reduce embodied carbon emissions (from hardware manufacturing), rather than operational (from running hardware). Our experiments are the first to analyze a data center application's end-to-end performance on different server generations, to reveal that older hardware can preserve performance in certain conditions (e.g., low load).