Exploration of Energy-Proportional Distributed Systems

With the advent of Internet of Things (IoT) and the increase of the Internet Services, more and more datacenters are needed to manage the Internet traffic. Energy consumption related to these infrastructures have already reached more than 2% of the global energy consumption and it is estimated to increase in the next years. Trends such as a billion more people coming online in developing countries, IoT, driverless cars, robots, and artificial intelligence (AI) are major drivers of unrelenting growth. Our work is intended to explore new distributed architectures to deploy datacenters in order to reduce their energy consumption and reach the energy proportionality. An effort in the use of Renewable Energy Sources (RES) and Energy Storage Systems (ESS) is done in order to approach the zero-carbon emission objective. In this sense, microgrid, nanogrid and smart grid structures are analyzed in terms of stability, architecture, control, communication and energy management.