ALL4GREEN

Active collaboration in datacenter ecosystem to reduce energy consumption and GHG emissions

(duration: 10/2011 – 4/2014 /// funding: Cordis FP7 – ICT systems for energy efficiency)

All4Green brings together relevant stakeholders to create a ‘sustainable ICT ecosystem' for the datacenter sector. By enabling datacenters, power suppliers and end-users to communicate their expected supply and demand, ICT resources can be better allocated to provide requested services, while saving energy and reducing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions.

Peak shaving and renewable energy

Renewable energy sources, such as wind, water and solar energy, are not predictable. Power suppliers can therefore not guarantee a completely 'green' energy supply during peak hours. In case of high demand, they are forced to to rely on dirty energy produced by diesel-fuelled generators, or they have to transport energy from faraway sources.

By asking datacenters to share their estimated power needs, power suppliers can better anticipate future energy demands. 'Peak shaving' is achieved by matching demand and supply, for instance by encouraging datacenters to delay low-priority jobs to moments when there is little service load.

Federated Datacenters and Green SLAs

In addition, federated datacenters can also save energy by moving computation and storage across their different physical networks, taking into account different environmental conditions (external temperature for natural cooling), and business conditions (cost and type of electricity at the different sites), and customer demand. This way datacenters can better match their energy demands to renewable energy supplies.

The datacenters can translate all this into flexible, green SLAs (Service Level Agreements) for their customers, offering cheaper services during low-traffic times, for instance during the night, or allowing lower performance standards for low-priority jobs.

Almende activities

The project partners will focus on development of communication structures between different parties involved in the sustainable ICT ecosystem. This will allow datacenters and power suppliers to match supply and demand, and datacenters to coordinate job scheduling and migration, and resource allocation across federated data centres.

Almende develops negotiating software agents that represent and act on behalf of all parties involved, weighing energy costs, GHG savings, priorities and other external factors to optimally coordinate and match the dynamic service requests and energy supplies.

Beyond FIT4Green

The project is a follow-up of the FIT4Green project, which reduced energy consumption within datacenters themselves. In particular, All4Green focuses on Green SLA-based distributed artificial intelligent solutions for truly federated datacenters and energy network management.

Links:

The FIT4Green website

Publications

Partners: