OpenDC-STEAM: Realistic Modeling and Systematic Exploration of Composable Techniques for Sustainable Datacenters
🤖 AI Summary
This study addresses the fragmented evaluation of existing sustainable data center technologies, which often overlooks their combined effects and trade-offs among carbon emissions, cost, and performance under real-world dynamic conditions. To bridge this gap, we propose OpenDC-STEAM, an open-source, customizable simulator that enables systematic assessment of individual and joint impacts of techniques such as horizontal scaling, battery scheduling, and job time-shifting under realistic workloads, hardware configurations, and time-varying grid carbon intensity profiles. Our experiments uncover complex interaction effects, demonstrate that integrated strategies can substantially reduce both operational and embodied carbon emissions, and quantify the inherent trade-offs across the three objectives. The framework provides a reproducible and scalable foundation for informed decision-making in green data center design.
Application Category
📝 Abstract
The need to reduce datacenter carbon footprint is urgent. While many sustainability techniques have been proposed, they are often evaluated in isolation, using limited setups or analytical models that overlook real-world dynamics and interactions between methods. This makes it challenging for researchers and operators to understand the effectiveness and trade-offs of combining such techniques. We design OpenDC-STEAM, an open-source customizable datacenter simulator, to investigate the individual and combined impact of sustainability techniques on datacenter operational and embodied carbon emissions, and their trade-off with performance. Using STEAM, we systematically explore three representative techniques - horizontal scaling, leveraging batteries, and temporal shifting - with diverse representative workloads, datacenter configurations, and carbon-intensity traces. Our analysis highlights that datacenter dynamics can influence their effectiveness and that combining strategies can significantly lower emissions, but introduces complex cost-emissions-performance trade-offs that STEAM can help navigate. STEAM supports the integration of new models and techniques, making it a foundation framework for holistic, quantitative, and reproducible research in sustainable computing. Following open-science principles, STEAM is available as FOSS: https://github.com/atlarge-research/OpenDC-STEAM.
Problem
Research questions and friction points this paper is trying to address.
sustainable datacenters
carbon footprint
composable techniques
emissions-performance trade-offs
systematic evaluation
Innovation
Methods, ideas, or system contributions that make the work stand out.
sustainable datacenters
composable techniques
carbon emissions modeling
open-source simulator
performance-emissions trade-offs
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