WaterWise: Co-optimizing Carbon- and Water-Footprint Toward Environmentally Sustainable Cloud Computing

TL;DR

WaterWise is a novel job scheduler that co-optimizes carbon and water footprints in cloud computing, addressing the conflicting nature of these sustainability metrics to improve environmental impact.

Contribution

It introduces a new scheduler that simultaneously optimizes for both carbon and water footprints in geographically distributed data centers.

Findings

Carbon and water sustainability are at odds, and optimizing one can harm the other.

WaterWise effectively balances both footprints, improving overall environmental sustainability.

The scheduler demonstrates significant reductions in carbon and water footprints in experimental evaluations.

Abstract

The carbon and water footprint of large-scale computing systems poses serious environmental sustainability risks. In this study, we discover that, unfortunately, carbon and water sustainability are at odds with each other - and, optimizing one alone hurts the other. Toward that goal, we introduce, WaterWise, a novel job scheduler for parallel workloads that intelligently co-optimizes carbon and water footprint to improve the sustainability of geographically distributed data centers.