A Green Enterprise Computing Architecture for Developing Countries

TL;DR

This paper introduces AnywareDC, an energy-efficient enterprise computing architecture for developing countries that leverages laptops and centralized clusters to reduce energy consumption and extend backup power duration during outages.

Contribution

The paper proposes AnywareDC, a novel architecture that significantly reduces energy use and backup power requirements in enterprise settings with intermittent power supply.

Findings

Energy usage reduced by up to 80% compared to non-optimized systems.

Up to 20% energy savings over previous architectures like Anyware.

Extended backup power duration and reduced generator fuel costs.

Abstract

Developing countries often have access to limited energy resources, which frequently results in power cuts and failures. During these power cuts, enterprises rely on backup sources for power such as uninterruptible power supplies (UPS) and electric generators. This paper proposes AnywareDC, an architecture that builds on the recent work on Anyware to reduce energy utilization in the presence of such intermittent power supplies. Anyware reduces energy usage by providing enterprise users laptops instead of desktops, while maintaining performance using a central compute cluster. Our basic insight is that in the presence of power cuts, only the routers and the cluster needs to be provided power: the laptops can continue to run on their own batteries. This reduces both energy usage and UPS load allowing it to supply power for longer, thus also saving generator fuel costs. Simulations show that this architecture reduces energy usage by up to 80% compared to one not using Anyware, and by up to 20% compared to Anyware.