SEEDS: A Solar-Based Energy-Efficient Distributed Server Farm

Abstract

Distributed renewable energy has emerged as a promising resource because of its environmental friendliness and economic considerations. However, most renewable energy sources are unreliable and may require considerable effort to be efficiently utilized in a computing center for providing services. In this paper, we exploit distributed renewable energy (e.g., solar energy) and peer-to-peer (P2P) technologies to aggregate distributed computing resources to provide an infrastructure called solar-based energy-efficient distributed server (SEEDS) farm for distributed computing and distributed storage. Energy-efficient devices (e.g., embedded devices) powered by solar energy form a P2P computing system to provide their computing resources to end-users. Specifically, this paper uses a Web-based service as a case study. A group of solar-powered embedded devices acts as a front-end cooperative caching system for Web servers. Web objects may be accessed through the distributed caching system without going through servers, and thus we can reduce brown energy consumption of the servers. This paper also develops an analytical model to evaluate the total energy consumption of Web-based services with and without SEEDS. Theoretical and simulation results show that the SEEDS system can support services and achieve significant improvements in energy efficiency by aggregating distributed energy resources.