Cutting the Electric Bill for Internet-Scale Systems

Cutting the Electric Bill for Internet-Scale Systems
http://ccr.sigcomm.org/online/files/p123.pdf

SIGCOMM２００９の論文。まだちゃんと読んでいないが、非常に面白そうだ。

Energy expenses are becoming an increasingly important
fraction of data center operating costs. At the same time,
the energy expense per unit of computation can vary significantly
between two different locations. In this paper,
we characterize the variation due to fluctuating electricity
prices and argue that existing distributed systems should be
able to exploit this variation for significant economic gains.
Electricity prices exhibit both temporal and geographic variation,
due to regional demand differences, transmission inefficiencies,
and generation diversity. Starting with historical
electricity prices, for twenty nine locations in the US, and
network traffic data collected on Akamai’s CDN, we use simulation
to quantify the possible economic gains for a realistic
workload. Our results imply that existing systems may be
able to save millions of dollars a year in electricity costs, by
being cognizant of locational computation cost differences.