Researchers find way to reduce data center energy

Researchers from the University of Waterloo have found a way to reduce the energy use of some data centers by as much as 30%.

Computing accounts for as much as 5% of the world’s total energy use every day, and that type of energy consumption is expected to significantly increase as computing power is needed to meet the exponential growth of artificial intelligence. Nearly all web traffic is routed through data centers, the majority of which use the open-source operating system Linux.

“Information arrives at data centers in ‘packets,’ and then the data center’s frontend, kind of like a receptionist at a front desk, figures out where to send those packets,” said Martin Karsten, professor of Computer Science in the Waterloo’s Math Faculty.

Karsten and his co-author, Computer Science grad student Peter Cai, realized that the way that data centers were processing network traffic was inefficient and devised a small change to make it far more efficient.

“We didn’t add anything,” Karsten said. “We just rearranged what is done when, which leads to a much better usage of the data center’s CPU caches. It’s kind of like rearranging the pipeline at a manufacturing plant, so that you don’t have people running around all the time.”

Karsten teamed up with Joe Damato, distinguished engineer at Fastly, to develop a small section of code—approximately 30 lines—that would improve Linux’s network traffic processing. If adopted, the new method could reduce the energy consumption of important data center operations by as much as 30%, Karsten said.

They tested their solution’s effectiveness and submitted it to Linux for consideration. The code has been published this month as part of Linux’s newest kernel, release version 6.13.

“All these big companies—Amazon, Google, Meta—use Linux in some capacity, but they’re very picky about how they decide to use it,” Karsten said. “If they choose to ‘switch on’ our method in their data centers, it could save gigawatt hours of energy worldwide. Almost every single service request that happens on the Internet could be positively affected by this.”

Karsten points to this research, as well as the construction of a cutting-edge green computer server room in Waterloo’s upcoming Mathematics 4 building, as examples of the kind of sustainability research that computer scientists need to prioritize. “We all have a part to play in building a greener future,” he said.

The Linux kernel code addition developed by Karsten and Damato was based on research published in Proceedings of the ACM on Measurement and Analysis of Computing Systems.