Characterizing and Analyzing Renewable Energy Driven Data Centers

An increasing number of data centers today start to incorporate renewable energy solutions to cap their carbon footprint. However, the impact of renewable energy on large-scale data center design is still not well understood. In this paper, the authors model and evaluate data centers driven by intermittent renewable energy. Using real-world data center and renewable energy source traces, they show that renewable power utilization and load tuning frequency are two critical metrics for designing sustainable high-performance data centers.