Collaborative Research: NGSDI: CarbonFirst: A Sustainable and Reliable Carbon-Centric Cloud-Edge Software Infrastructure

Cloud computing platforms continue to grow exponentially, and are becoming the foundation of our information-based economy. While the cloud’s energy demand grew more slowly than expected over the past decade due to aggressive energy-efficiency optimizations, there are few remaining optimization opportunities using traditional methods. As a result, the cloud’s continued exponential growth will translate into exponentially rising energy demand, which will position it as one of the primary contributors to global carbon emissions.

To address the problem, this project elevates carbon to a first-class metric in designing a sustainable and reliable cloud-edge software infrastructure that can enable continued exponential growth.

The project's foundation is a software-defined energy virtualization layer that provides applications visibility into, and control of, their own energy and carbon usage. The project will leverage this foundation to develop higher-level systems abstractions for supporting carbon-efficient applications at different geographical scales including: a cluster balloon technique, which automatically adjusts applications’ energy usage to match a volatile clean energy supply at local edge sites; edge hopping mechanisms, which exploit lower regional energy volatility to balance energy across edge sites; and carbon capping policies, which track applications’ global grid carbon emissions and restrict grid energy after reaching the cap.

The project has the potential for significant societal impact by enabling commercial cloud platforms to sustainably continue their exponential growth. The project will conduct outreach by incorporating topics from the proposal into summer programs for local middle and high school students at the partner institutions. The project will also impact the curriculum at these institutions by adopting elements of edge, cloud, and sustainable computing into graduate and advanced undergraduate courses.

Finally, the project will recruit a diverse group of students by leveraging institutional diversity efforts and will involve undergraduate students through Research Experience for Undergraduate (REU) projects.

The project will make its software artifacts, datasets, and research results available to the research community on the project website at http://www.carbonfirst.org and via the UMass Trace Repository at http://traces.cs.umass.edu. Artifacts derived from this project will be maintained on the project website and the trace repository for a minimum of five years after the project's conclusion.

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.