Umeå universitet
Billions of people use the internet, which requires huge data
centres and results in an enormous energy consumption.
In her doctoral
dissertation at Umeå University in Sweden, Mina Sedaghat has developed
techniques and algorithms to manage and schedule the resources in these large
data centers at a lower cost, greater efficiently, more reliability and with a
lower environmental impact.
Korean
pop-video, Gangnam Style, available on YouTube has had 2.5 billion viewers,
which results in a power consumption of more than 400 GWh.
If, in the worst case,
the electricity to serve such a demand is generated by diesel, it would mean
that more than 250,000 tons of CO2 would be produced, which is equivalent to
over 100,000 cars per year.
This increase in
internet usage and the information generated by nearly one billion people
entails large data centres with row after row of servers, requiring huge amount
of space, electricity and cooling.
The
dissertation introduces methods and techniques to efficiently use the servers
in the data centres, so that load can be served with fewer resources.
What technology can be used?
"It
could be optimised scheduling systems packing several software components into
a few servers in a way that makes full use of processors, memory, bandwidth,
network capacity and other resources. In this way, energy efficiency can be
improved reducing the negative environmental impact, and at the same time
reducing operational costs," says Mina Sedaghat.
The
research leading to Sedaghat's dissertation has been conducted in collaboration
with multiple people at Google Inc., Departments of Mathematics and
Mathematical Statistics at Umeå University, and the Department of Communication
Network at the Royal Institute of Technology (KTH) in Sweden.