The Sunk Carbon Fallacy: Rethinking Carbon Footprint Metrics for Effective Carbon-Aware Scheduling

Fuente: arXiv
Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Bashir, Noman, Gohil, Varun, Belavadi, Anagha, Shahrad, Mohammad, Irwin, David, Olivetti, Elsa, Delimitrou, Christina
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
Subjects:
Online Access:
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1866929551484911616
author Bashir, Noman
Gohil, Varun
Belavadi, Anagha
Shahrad, Mohammad
Irwin, David
Olivetti, Elsa
Delimitrou, Christina
author_facet Bashir, Noman
Gohil, Varun
Belavadi, Anagha
Shahrad, Mohammad
Irwin, David
Olivetti, Elsa
Delimitrou, Christina
contents The rapid increase in computing demand and its corresponding energy consumption have focused attention on computing's impact on the climate and sustainability. Prior work proposes metrics that quantify computing's carbon footprint across several lifecycle phases, including its supply chain, operation, and end-of-life. Industry uses these metrics to optimize the carbon footprint of manufacturing hardware and running computing applications. Unfortunately, prior work on optimizing datacenters' carbon footprint often succumbs to the \emph{sunk cost fallacy} by considering embodied carbon emissions (a sunk cost) when making operational decisions (i.e., job scheduling and placement), which leads to operational decisions that do not always reduce the total carbon footprint. In this paper, we evaluate carbon-aware job scheduling and placement on a given set of servers for a number of carbon accounting metrics. Our analysis reveals state-of-the-art carbon accounting metrics that include embodied carbon emissions when making operational decisions can actually increase the total carbon footprint of executing a set of jobs. We study the factors that affect the added carbon cost of such suboptimal decision-making. We then use a real-world case study from a datacenter to demonstrate how the sunk carbon fallacy manifests itself in practice. Finally, we discuss the implications of our findings in better guiding effective carbon-aware scheduling in on-premise and cloud datacenters.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2410_15087
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle The Sunk Carbon Fallacy: Rethinking Carbon Footprint Metrics for Effective Carbon-Aware Scheduling
Bashir, Noman
Gohil, Varun
Belavadi, Anagha
Shahrad, Mohammad
Irwin, David
Olivetti, Elsa
Delimitrou, Christina
Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing
Computers and Society
Emerging Technologies
Performance
The rapid increase in computing demand and its corresponding energy consumption have focused attention on computing's impact on the climate and sustainability. Prior work proposes metrics that quantify computing's carbon footprint across several lifecycle phases, including its supply chain, operation, and end-of-life. Industry uses these metrics to optimize the carbon footprint of manufacturing hardware and running computing applications. Unfortunately, prior work on optimizing datacenters' carbon footprint often succumbs to the \emph{sunk cost fallacy} by considering embodied carbon emissions (a sunk cost) when making operational decisions (i.e., job scheduling and placement), which leads to operational decisions that do not always reduce the total carbon footprint. In this paper, we evaluate carbon-aware job scheduling and placement on a given set of servers for a number of carbon accounting metrics. Our analysis reveals state-of-the-art carbon accounting metrics that include embodied carbon emissions when making operational decisions can actually increase the total carbon footprint of executing a set of jobs. We study the factors that affect the added carbon cost of such suboptimal decision-making. We then use a real-world case study from a datacenter to demonstrate how the sunk carbon fallacy manifests itself in practice. Finally, we discuss the implications of our findings in better guiding effective carbon-aware scheduling in on-premise and cloud datacenters.
title The Sunk Carbon Fallacy: Rethinking Carbon Footprint Metrics for Effective Carbon-Aware Scheduling
topic Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing
Computers and Society
Emerging Technologies
Performance
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.15087