Objectives

At present, data centres (DCs) are one of the major energy consumers and source of CO2 emissions globally. The GREENDC project addresses this growing challenge by developing and exploiting a novel approach to forecasting energy demands. The project will bring together five leading academic and industrial partners with the overall aim of reducing energy consumption and CO2 emissions in specific national DCs.

It will implement a total of 163 person-months staff and knowledge exchanges between industry and academic partners. More specifically, knowledge of data centres operations will be transferred from industry to academic partners, whereas simulation based optimization for best practice of energy demand control will be transmitted from academia to industry through the knowledge transfer scheme.

The specific objectives of the GREENDC project are as follows:

• O1, defining energy demand forecasting and control problems through a systematic review of the literature on the energy optimisation in IDCs considering carbon footprint and field studies in two real world IDCs at industrial partners to develop a deeper understanding of the key variables and parameters that affect GHG emissions, service level and cost of IDC operations;
• O2, mathematical and simulation modelling of IDC operations and developing an efficient and scalable metaheuristic optimisation techniques to guide the search in an interactive mode with the simulation module for trade-off analysis in the form of Pareto-optimal frontier;
• O3, prototyping a decision support tool (GREENDC DSS) for industrial applications by industrial partners (TSAT and DAVID) and other companies operating IDCs;
• O4, testing, validating and benchmarking of the decision support tool using case studies from TSAT and DAVID that ensure minimum 10% improvement in energy consumption of the pilot IDCs in Turkey and Bulgaria;
• O5, dissemination of results to practitioners as well as academic beneficiaries through conferences, workshops and academic publications meeting minimum threshold as defined in Table B3.1 and Table B3.2;
• O6, providing a new and lasting collaboration opportunities between UBRUN, TSAT, GTU, DAVID and LKKE through 215 PMs of cross-sectorial knowledge exchange by 16 experienced and 13 early-stage researchers;
• O7, training early stage researchers through their participation in the research and technological development activities of the project.

Finally, the GREENDC project will develop an IDC simulator in which IDC managers can evaluate different strategies to minimise energy consumption and CO2 emissions in the consideration of space and time dimensions as described above.

The secondments proposed in this project will allow for the above factors to be studied through simulation techniques and algorithms, resulting in important knowledge transfers between the IDCs, consortium partners, industry and academia, and through outreach activities create more awareness about the importance of these challenges for the public to take action into pushing the involved stakeholders to reduce the ecological footprint.