Collaborative Research: NGSDI: Foundations of Clean and Balanced Datacenters: Treehouse

Computing requires energy. Most computing is done in centralized hubs called datacenters. Datacenters consume an estimated 1-2% of worldwide electricity production.

Datacenter computing, and its energy use, is projected to continue to grow rapidly, perhaps as fast as doubling every few years. This is simply not sustainable. The Treehouse project aims to improve the energy efficiency of datacenter computing by making datacenter computing energy use accountable to users at a fine-grained level and by reducing unnecessary waste in the most frequently used parts of datacenter computation.

Treehouse improves datacenter energy efficiency in several ways. Treehouse introduces a new computational abstraction that allows new energy optimizations by both application developers (by making application energy use visible at a fine-grained level) and systems designers (by identifying when energy-efficient optimizations can be safely performed without compromising user goals for application performance and reliability).

Additional strategies include reducing unnecessary software bloat, reducing resource stranding, and new algorithms to exploit the opportunity posed by new types of hardware with complex tradeoffs between performance and energy use.

Beyond better energy and resource management, Treehouse provides end users the tools to understand and reduce their individual carbon use from cloud services. This can fundamentally change the way the cloud computing industry thinks about datacenter energy use. Datacenter operators can provide new energy efficient computing models at lower cost.

Treehouse software systems and protocols will be open source. Through outreach and new educational materials, Treehouse will pioneer the training of a new type of energy-aware engineer to meet societal needs for an energy-efficient computing infrastructure.

Treehouse will produce software artifacts, hardware designs, and the results of running those programs and artifacts. These materials will be available for public use under a permissive open source license, archived in multiple locations, and available at the project website treehouse.cs.washington.edu for at least five years after the completion of the project.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.