University at Buffalo School of Management

26 Buffalo Business Autumn 2023 Insights Business of Climate Change Reducing the carbon footprint of data centers As data centers are expected to consume 8% of the world's electricity by 2030, new School of Management research has discovered a strat- egy to conserve power in these IT behemoths — and optimize their data processing performance. Published in Information Systems Research, the study found that using a mix of two different resource manage- ment strategies resulted in near-optimal energy efficiency under all workload conditions. "Data centers consume a tremendous amount of energy because they gener- ate heat, which requires cooling services, and when the servers communicate across racks, energy consumption goes through the roof," says study co-author Ram Ramesh, professor of management science and systems. "The rise in energy costs coupled with the urgent need to reduce the carbon footprint together create an imperative for new approaches to achieve efficiency." The researchers collected nearly 3 terabytes of data from a supercomput- ing center over a one-month period, and analyzed the power consumption and heat load, and how those translated into total energy consumption on a second- by-second basis. They then developed a model that uses observations from previous time steps to predict how the total computing load and its distribution across servers would affect total energy c o n s u m p t i o n i n a d a t a c e n t e r. Us i n g this model, they discovered the optimal way to allocate computing resources for incoming jobs. Their findings show that data center managers can reduce energy consump- tion 10-30% by consolidating jobs to as few servers as possible when workloads are high, and evenly distributing the work- load across all servers when loads are low. And, it's simple to find the transition point between the two strategies using their methods. "When we focus on energy conser- vation while allocating computing resources, certain jobs can take longer to complete, so there is a tradeoff between minimizing energy consump- tion and optimizing job performance." says Ramesh. "By attaining an efficient balance in this tradeoff, companies can reduce their environmental impact, complete jobs on time and save millions of dollars in energy costs each year." N E W S A B O U T FA C U LT Y A N D T H E I R R E S E A R C H STRATEGIC INITIATIVES As part of our mission to define the future of management, Dean Iyer has unified the School of Management around four distinct areas of focus: • Business analytics • Social impact of management • Business of climate change • Innovation, entrepreneurship and leadership These strategic initiatives are integrated across academic areas and incorporated into the school's programs, teaching, experiential learning, partnerships and research to help us realize our vision of a world of transformational leaders and organizations who change society for the better. The examples that follow demonstrate how our faculty are bringing new perspectives to these areas through their research. Ramesh

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