Enabling Sustainable Clouds via Environmentally Opportunistic Computing

Increasing economic and environmental costs of running data centers has driven interest in sustainable computing. Environmentally Opportunistic Computing (EOC) is an approach to harvesting heat produced by computing clusters. Our Green Cloud EOC prototype serves as an operational demonstration that IT resources can be integrated with the dominate energy footprint of existing facilities and dynamically controlled to balance process throughput, thermal transfer, and free cooling via job management and migration. We will describe the architecture and operation of this successful prototype with prime interest in the management of servers running in free cooling conditions.