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Greening as a
Service
(Supported by: NSF CSR , NSF CAREER) Research Challenge:
Internet services that provide search, e-commerce, and social networking have changed the world, but their growing carbon footprint is a concern. By 2020, the annual carbon footprint of hosting centers worldwide is expected to exceed the footprint of the Netherlands. Massive carbon footprints contribute to climate change and could lead to costly, punitive regulations. Our research attempts to slow the growth of carbon footprints by moving Internet services to clean energy. The challenge is that, as of today, most sources of clean energy are more expensive per joule than dirty sources.
We propose greening services, a new type of service that aligns clean energy goals with profit incentives. Greening services use clean energy to power requests routed through their servers, even if those requests access servers run by other services. In other words, a greening service is a service that makes other services green. In our vision, greening services will use renewable energy credits or carbon offsets. These transferable certificates undo greenhouse-gas emissions transparently, even when emissions occur in carbon-heavy areas, making them attractive to large-scale, geographically distributed services.
Greening services work because some users will prefer to route their requests through environmentally sustainable services. Greening services can profit from those users without incurring the full costs of running large scale services. However, greening services must manage their costs. Our systems research studies the potential for caching on greening services. We also study the challenge of accurately accounting the carbon footprint of remote servers.
Recommended Reading:
Adaptive Green Hosting, ICAC 2012
ISSST 2010 (Third Best Paper)
Impact:
Datagreening.com is prototype greening service. It moves email (specifically, IMAP) to clean energy. The site is publically accessible in the Beta version. Our goal is to offset 2 Tonnes of CO2E in 2014. We support any type of email that can be accessed through IMAP, in particular we often host GMail, Yahoo, Hotmail users.
Media and Press Release:
Visit https://www.datagreening.com