Minisymposium Presentation

The growing climate impact of increased Greenhouse Gas Emissions and CO2 levels in Earth's atmosphere highlights the value and importance of technologies that reduce such impact. Electricity generation is a significant contributor to global CO2 emissions, and the data center industry is expected to reach anywhere from 3 to 13% of global electricity demand by 2030. Data centers can facilitate grid decarbonization in a manner different from isolated power loads, and Google has set on a mission to increase and scale carbon awareness via new technology solutions. We present an overview and enhancements of Google’s Carbon-Intelligent Computing System, and discuss technical challenges associated with increasing and harnessing temporal and spatial flexibility of diverse workloads running in Google data centers. Furthermore, we share some insights from building systems that leverage different types of workload flexibility to effectively increase resource efficiency and reduce environmental impact, while meeting infrastructure and application SLOs. Finally, we pause some key, open questions from our investigations of load shaping strategies aimed not only to reduce grid-level emissions, but contribute to energy systems’ more resilient, robust and cost-efficient decarbonization.