Quantifying the environmental advantages of large-scale computing

The practical advantages of pay-as-you-go, scalable computing have made large-scale cloud computing services an appealing option for many consumers. At the same time, large-scale datacenters have attracted attention as one of the fastest growing segments of carbon production. In this paper, we attempt to quantify the footprint of various sizes of datacenters in the context of two popular types of small-scale business applications (represented by TPC-C and TPC-H). We evaluate energy, materials and cost as systems scale, accounting for infrastructure, provisioning for future growth, and underutilized resources.