On the Limitations of Carbon-Aware Temporal and Spatial Workload Shifting in the Cloud
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3627703.3650079.pdf
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2.85 MB
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Author(s)
Sukprasert, Thanathorn
Souza, Abel
Bashir, Noman
Irwin, David
Shenoy, Prashant
Date Issued
April 22, 2024
Publisher
Association for Computing Machinery
Citation
Thanathorn Sukprasert, Abel Souza, Noman Bashir, David Irwin, and Prashant Shenoy. 2024. On the Limitations of Carbon-Aware Temporal and Spatial Workload Shifting in the Cloud. In Nineteenth European Conference on Computer Systems (EuroSys ’24), April 22–25, 2024, Athens, Greece. ACM, New York, NY, USA, 18 pages.
Version
Final published version
Abstract
Cloud platforms have been focusing on reducing their carbon emissions by shifting workloads across time and locations to when and where low-carbon energy is available. Despite the prominence of this idea, prior work has only quantified the potential of spatiotemporal workload shifting in narrow settings, i.e., for specific workloads in select regions. In particular, there has been limited work on quantifying an upper bound on the ideal and practical benefits of carbon-aware spatiotemporal workload shifting for a wide range of cloud workloads. To address the problem, we conduct a detailed data-driven analysis to understand the benefits and limitations of carbon-aware spatiotemporal scheduling for cloud workloads. We utilize carbon intensity data from 123 regions, encompassing most major cloud sites, to analyze two broad classes of workloads---batch and interactive---and their various characteristics, e.g., job duration, deadlines, and SLOs. Our findings show that while spatiotemporal workload shifting can reduce workloads' carbon emissions, the practical upper bounds of these carbon reductions are currently limited and far from ideal. We also show that simple scheduling policies often yield most of these reductions, with more sophisticated techniques yielding little additional benefit. Notably, we also find that the benefit of carbon-aware workload scheduling relative to carbon-agnostic scheduling will decrease as the energy supply becomes "greener."
Description
EuroSys ’24, April 22–25, 2024, Athens, Greece
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Creative Commons Attribution
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DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1145/3627703.3650079
