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Reducing buildings’ carbon emissions is an important sustainability challenge. While scheduling flexible building loads has been previously used for a variety of grid and energy optimizations, carbon footprint reduction using such flexible loads poses new challenges since such methods need to balance both energy and carbon costs while also reducing user inconvenience from delaying such loads. This article highlights the potential conflict between electricity prices and carbon emissions and the resulting tradeoffs in carbon-aware and cost-aware load scheduling. To address this tradeoff, we propose GreenThrift, a home automation system that leverages the scheduling capabilities of smart appliances and knowledge of future carbon intensity and cost to reduce both the carbon emissions and costs of flexible energy loads. At the heart of GreenThrift is an optimization technique that automatically computes schedules based on user configurations and preferences. We evaluate the effectiveness of GreenThrift using real-world carbon intensity data, electricity prices, and load traces from multiple locations and across different scenarios and objectives. Our results show that GreenThrift can replicate the offline optimal and retains 97% of the savings when optimizing the carbon emissions. Moreover, we show how GreenThrift can balance the conflict between carbon and cost and retain 95.3% and 85.5% of the potential carbon and cost savings, respectively. 

Content Delivery Networks (CDNs) are Internet-scale systems that deliver streaming and web content to users from many geographically distributed edge data centers. Since large CDNs can comprise hundreds of thousands of servers deployed in thousands of global data centers, they can consume a large amount of energy for their operations and thus are responsible for large amounts of Green House Gas (GHG) emissions. As these networks scale to cope with increased demand for bandwidth-intensive content, their emissions are expected to rise further, making sustainable design and operation an important goal for the future. Since different geographic regions vary in the carbon intensity and cost of their electricity supply, in this paper, we consider spatial shifting as a key technique to jointly optimize the carbon emissions and energy costs of a CDN. We present two forms of shifting: spatial load shifting, which operates within the time scale of minutes, and VM capacity shifting, which operates at a coarse time scale of days or weeks. The proposed techniques jointly reduce carbon and electricity costs while considering the performance impact of increased request latency from such optimizations. Using real-world traces from a large CDN and carbon intensity and energy prices data from electric grids in different regions, we show that increasing the latency by 60ms can reduce carbon emissions by up to 35.5%, 78.6%, and 61.7% across the US, Europe, and worldwide, respectively. In addition, we show that capacity shifting can increase carbon savings by up to 61.2%. Finally, we analyze the benefits of spatial shifting and show that it increases carbon savings from added solar energy by 68% and 130% in the US and Europe, respectively. 

As computing demand continues to grow, minimizing its environmental impact has become crucial. This paper presents a study on carbon-aware scheduling algorithms, focusing on reducing carbon emissions of delay-tolerant batch workloads. Inspired by the Follow the Leader strategy, we introduce a simple yet efficient meta-algorithm, called FTL, that dynamically selects the most efficient scheduling algorithm based on real-time data and historical performance. Without fine-tuning and parameter optimization, FTL adapts to variability in job lengths, carbon intensity forecasts, and regional energy characteristics, consistently outperforming traditional carbon-aware scheduling algorithms. Through extensive experiments using real-world data traces, FTL achieves 8.2% and 14% improvement in average carbon footprint reduction over the closest runner-up algorithm and the carbon-agnostic algorithm, respectively, demonstrating its efficacy in minimizing carbon emissions across multiple geographical regions.¹ 

As edge computing and sensing devices continue to proliferate, distributed machine learning (ML) inference pipelines are becoming popular for enabling low-latency, real-time decision-making at scale. However, the geographically dispersed and often resource-constrained nature of edge devices makes them susceptible to various failures, such as hardware malfunctions, network disruptions, and device overloading. These edge failures can significantly affect the performance and availability of inference pipelines and the sensing-to-decision-making loops they enable. In addition, the complexity of task dependencies amplifies the difficulty of maintaining performant and reliable ML operations. To address these challenges and minimize the impact of edge failures on inference pipelines, this paper presents several fault-tolerant approaches, including sensing redundancy, structural resilience, failover replication, and pipeline reconfiguration. For each approach, we explain the key techniques and highlight their effectiveness and tradeoffs. Finally, we discuss the challenges associated with these approaches and outline future directions. 

Traditionally, multi-tenant cloud and edge platforms use fair-share schedulers to fairly multiplex resources across applications. These schedulers ensure applications receive processing time proportional to a configurable share of the total time. Unfortunately, enforcing time-fairness across applications often violates energy-fairness, such that some applications consume more than their fair share of energy. This occurs because applications either do not fully utilize their resources or operate at a reduced frequency/voltage during their time-slice. The problem is particularly acute for machine learning (ML) applications using GPUs, where model size largely dictates utilization and energy usage. Enforcing energy-fairness is also important since energy is a costly and limited resource. For example, in cloud platforms, energy dominates operating costs and is limited by the power delivery infrastructure, while in edge platforms, energy is often scarce and limited by energy harvesting and battery constraints. To address the problem, we define the notion of Energy-Time Fairness (ETF), which enables a configurable tradeoff between energy and time fairness, and then design a scheduler that enforces it. We show that ETF satisfies many well-accepted fairness properties. ETF and the new tradeoff it offers are important, as some applications, especially ML models, are time/latency-sensitive and others are energy-sensitive. Thus, while enforcing pure energy-fairness starves time/latency-sensitive applications (of time) and enforcing pure time-fairness starves energy-sensitive applications (of energy), ETF is able to mind the gap between the two. We implement an ETF scheduler, and show that it improves fairness by up to 2x, incentivizes energy efficiency, and exposes a configurable knob to operate between energy- and time-fairness. 

Traditionally, multi-tenant cloud and edge platforms use fair-share schedulers to fairly multiplex resources across applications. These schedulers ensure applications receive processing time proportional to a configurable share of the total time. Unfortunately, enforcing time-fairness across applications often violates energy-fairness, such that some applications consume more than their fair share of energy. This occurs because applications either do not fully utilize their resources or operate at a reduced frequency/voltage during their time-slice. The problem is particularly acute for machine learning (ML) applications using GPUs, where model size largely dictates utilization and energy usage. Enforcing energy-fairness is also important since energy is a costly and limited resource. For example, in cloud platforms, energy dominates operating costs and is limited by the power delivery infrastructure, while in edge platforms, energy is often scarce and limited by energy harvesting and battery constraints. To address the problem, we define the notion of Energy-Time Fairness (ETF), which enables a configurable tradeoff between energy and time fairness, and then design a scheduler that enforces it. We show that ETF satisfies many well-accepted fairness properties. ETF and the new tradeoff it offers are important, as some applications, especially ML models, are time/latency-sensitive and others are energy-sensitive. Thus, while enforcing pure energy-fairness starves time/latency-sensitive applications (of time) and enforcing pure time-fairness starves energy-sensitive applications (of energy), ETF is able to mind the gap between the two. We implement an ETF scheduler, and show that it improves fairness by up to 2x, incentivizes energy efficiency, and exposes a configurable knob to operate between energy- and time-fairness.