In the context of global warming, reducing the carbon emissions of computer infrastructures is a top priority. Datacenters are responsible for a large fraction of the carbon emissions of IT.
To reduce the carbon footprint of datacenters, actions at multiple levels need to be taken. The way of managing and using the hardware should change [1]. However, efforts made only at the hardware level will not be enough to solve the challenges we are facing: software design needs to be made carbon aware [2]. A good example that illustrates the challenges we are facing is reliability and storage. To ensure the availability of data in the Cloud despite crashes, data are replicated on different storage devices. To make data storage more efficient, SSDs can be used instead of HDDs. However, when considering the total carbon footprint, including the carbon emissions required to build the devices, it is not clear anymore than using SSDs is better [3]. To answer this question, many parameters need to be taken into account: The carbon footprint related to the construction of the devices; the energy consumption of the software running on these devices; the quantity of work per energy unit that a software solution running on a given hardware can achieve; the impact of each solution on the other software components in the system, etc.
Considering the reliable storage of data in datacenters, the goal of this internship is to analyze the carbon footprint of different approaches and, if possible, to propose a new approach that would reduce the carbon emissions.
[1] Tomlinson, Amanda, and George Porter. “Something Old, Something New: Extending the Life of CPUs in Datacenters.”
[2] Anderson, Thomas, et al. “Treehouse: A Case For Carbon-Aware Datacenter Software.” arXiv preprint arXiv:2201.02120 (2022).
[3] Tannu, Swamit, and Prashant J. Nair. “The Dirty Secret of SSDs: Embodied Carbon.” arXiv preprint arXiv:2207.10793 (2022).
The intern will join the Informatics Laboratory of Univ. Grenoble Alpes (LIG), one of the largest laboratory in Computer Science in France. Univ. Grenoble Alpes is one of the 50 best universities in the world for computer science according to international rankings.
More specifically, the intern will work in the ERODS research team, that focus on the efficiency and robustness of distributed systems. ERODS is one of the top system research teams in France and in Europe, with publications in the most selective conferences of the domain.