GreenScale: Carbon-Aware Systems for Edge Computing

TL;DR

GreenScale is a framework that optimizes application scheduling across edge and cloud systems to reduce carbon emissions by considering renewable energy variability and infrastructure carbon output.

Contribution

It introduces a novel carbon-aware scheduling framework for edge-cloud systems, addressing renewable energy intermittency and providing a roadmap for green application development.

Findings

Carbon emissions reduced by up to 29.1% with GreenScale.

Optimizing for carbon yields different scheduling solutions than performance or energy efficiency.

Framework applicable to AI, gaming, and AR/VR applications.

Abstract

To improve the environmental implications of the growing demand of computing, future applications need to improve the carbon-efficiency of computing infrastructures. State-of-the-art approaches, however, do not consider the intermittent nature of renewable energy. The time and location-based carbon intensity of energy fueling computing has been ignored when determining how computation is carried out. This poses a new challenge -- deciding when and where to run applications across consumer devices at the edge and servers in the cloud. Such scheduling decisions become more complicated with the stochastic runtime variance and the amortization of the rising embodied emissions. This work proposes GreenScale, a framework to understand the design and optimization space of carbon-aware scheduling for green applications across the edge-cloud infrastructure. Based on the quantified carbon output of the infrastructure components, we demonstrate that optimizing for carbon, compared to performance and energy efficiency, yields unique scheduling solutions. Our evaluation with three representative categories of applications (i.e., AI, Game, and AR/VR) demonstrate that the carbon emissions of the applications can be reduced by up to 29.1% with the GreenScale. The analysis in this work further provides a detailed road map for edge-cloud application developers to build green applications.