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Main Authors: Guo, Yibo, Tomlinson, Amanda, Su, Runlong, Porter, George
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
Subjects:
Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.14022
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author Guo, Yibo
Tomlinson, Amanda
Su, Runlong
Porter, George
author_facet Guo, Yibo
Tomlinson, Amanda
Su, Runlong
Porter, George
contents Organizations are increasingly offloading their workloads to cloud platforms. For workloads with relaxed deadlines, this presents an opportunity to reduce the total carbon footprint of these computations by moving workloads to datacenters with access to low-carbon power. Recently published results have shown that the carbon footprint of the wide-area network (WAN) can be a significant share of the total carbon output of executing the workload itself, and so careful selection of the time and place where these computations are offloaded is critical. In this paper, we propose an approach to geographic workload migration that uses high-fidelity maps of physical Internet infrastructure to better estimate the carbon costs of WAN transfers. Our findings show that space-shifting workloads can achieve much higher carbon savings than time-shifting alone, if accurate estimates of WAN carbon costs are taken into account.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2504_14022
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle The Effect of the Network in Cutting Carbon for Geo-shifted Workloads
Guo, Yibo
Tomlinson, Amanda
Su, Runlong
Porter, George
Networking and Internet Architecture
Organizations are increasingly offloading their workloads to cloud platforms. For workloads with relaxed deadlines, this presents an opportunity to reduce the total carbon footprint of these computations by moving workloads to datacenters with access to low-carbon power. Recently published results have shown that the carbon footprint of the wide-area network (WAN) can be a significant share of the total carbon output of executing the workload itself, and so careful selection of the time and place where these computations are offloaded is critical. In this paper, we propose an approach to geographic workload migration that uses high-fidelity maps of physical Internet infrastructure to better estimate the carbon costs of WAN transfers. Our findings show that space-shifting workloads can achieve much higher carbon savings than time-shifting alone, if accurate estimates of WAN carbon costs are taken into account.
title The Effect of the Network in Cutting Carbon for Geo-shifted Workloads
topic Networking and Internet Architecture
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.14022