Topic

Avoiding the ecological catastrophe will require an joined effort from every actor in the society – the ICT industry included. We postulate that some environmental-aware individuals are willing to reflect upon and reduce the footprint associated to their usage of new technologies. Similarly to the Low-tech Magazine[1], a solar-powered and very lightweight website, this internship will study an off-grid “sufficient”[2] data center in which a part of the users accepts to delay, degrade or even cancel the execution of their tasks to reduce the overall footprint of the infrastructure

Objective of the internship

1. In a data center, the interaction with the user happens through Service Level Agreement (SLA). A first step would be to review the related works on “green SLA” [3-5] and user-aware scheduling[6-8]
2. Precise a specific case study: task model, workload, size of data center, category of users…
3. Propose and develop a scheduling policy taking into account the user flexibility. For example, the Batsim simulator (Python, C++) could be used.
4. Run experiments varying the input traces and the percentage of environmentally-concerned user to conclude on the sustainability of such an approach.

Expected ability of the student

• Programming
• Strong environmental concern
• Cloud computing and scheduling are a plus

Practical details

The internship will take place at IRIT laboratory in Toulouse. The student will be supervised by Goerges Da Costa (HdR, georges.da-costa@irit.fr) and Maël Madon (PhD student, X2016, mael.madon@irit.fr). A computer and an office will be provided, as well as a monthly internship stipend of 600€.

We also propose other internship topics in our team, check them here and do not hesitate to contact us.

Bibliography

[1] De Decker, K. LOW←TECH MAGAZINE. LOW←TECH MAGAZINE https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/about.html.

[2] Hilty, L. Computing Efficiency, Sufficiency, and Self-sufficiency: A Model for Sustainability? in LIMITS 2015, First Workshop on Computing within Limits (s.n., 2015). doi:10.5167/uzh-110766.

[3] Haque, Md. E., Le, K., Goiri, Í., Bianchini, R. & Nguyen, T. D. Providing green SLAs in High Performance Computing clouds. in 2013 International Green Computing Conference Proceedings 1–11 (2013). doi:10.1109/IGCC.2013.6604503.

[4] Amokrane, A., Langar, R., Zhani, M. F., Boutaba, R. & Pujolle, G. Greenslater: On Satisfying Green SLAs in Distributed Clouds. IEEE Trans. Netw. Serv. Manag. 12, 363–376 (2015).

[5] Basmadjian, R. et al. Making Data Centers Fit for Demand Response: Introducing GreenSDA and GreenSLA Contracts. IEEE Trans. Smart Grid 9, 3453–3464 (2018).

[6] Feitelson, D. G. Resampling with Feedback — A New Paradigm of Using Workload Data for Performance Evaluation. in Euro-Par 2016: Parallel Processing (eds. Dutot, P.-F. & Trystram, D.) 3–21 (Springer International Publishing, 2016). doi:10.1007/978-3-319-43659-3_1.

[7] Orgerie, A., Lefèvre, L. & Gelas, J. Save Watts in Your Grid: Green Strategies for Energy-Aware Framework in Large Scale Distributed Systems. in 2008 14th IEEE International Conference on Parallel and Distributed Systems 171–178 (2008). doi:10.1109/ICPADS.2008.97.

[8] Guyon, D., Orgerie, A.-C., Morin, C. & Agarwal, D. Involving users in energy conservation: a case study in scientific clouds. Int. J. Grid Util. Comput. 10, 272–282 (2019).