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arXiv · 2102.06614

TerraWatt: Sustaining Sustainable Computing of Containers in Containers

Jennifer Switzer·Rob McGuinness·Pat Pannuto·George Porter·Aaron Schulman·Barath Raghavan
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Abstract

Each day the world inches closer to a climate catastrophe and a sustainability revolution. To avoid the former and achieve the latter we must transform our use of energy. Surprisingly, today's growing problem is that there is too much wind and solar power generation at the wrong times and in the wrong places. We argue for the construction of TerraWatt: a geographically-distributed, large-scale, zero-carbon compute infrastructure using renewable energy and older hardware. Delivering zero-carbon compute for general cloud workloads is challenging due to spatiotemporal power variability. We describe the systems challenges in using intermittent renewable power at scale to fuel such an older, decentralized compute infrastructure.

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Jennifer Switzer, Rob McGuinness, Pat Pannuto, George Porter, Aaron Schulman, Barath Raghavan. 2021-02-12. TerraWatt: Sustaining Sustainable Computing of Containers in Containers. https://arxiv.org/abs/2102.06614

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