GRASP: a GReen energy Aware SDN Platform

Abstract

The transition to renewable energy sources for data centers has become a popular trend in the IT industry. However, the volatility of renewable energy, such as solar and wind power, impedes the operation of green data centers. In this work, we leverage Software Defined Networking (SDN) to build GRASP, a platform that schedules job requests to distributed data centers according to the amount of green energy available at each site. GRASP can be re-configured with different scheduling algorithms to address diverse factors such as amounts of instantly available solar power, wind power and CPU load of data centers. We utilize realistic green energy datasets from National Solar Radiation Database and evaluate GRASP in the GENI testbed; in addition, we create necessary GENI artifacts to repeat our experiment. GRASP can serve as a practical platform to test various job scheduling mechanisms for distributed green data centers.