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Microsoft joins scientists to find a way to reuse decommissioned servers

Pabio December 27, 2024

GreenSKUs redefine server design for sustainable cloud computing efficiency
Energy-efficient GreenSKUs tackle the growing carbon costs of cloud computing
Microsoft is a leader in reusing server components to reduce emissions

Servers consume large amounts of energy when operational and generate significant carbon emissions from manufacturing.

To meet this challenge, researchers from MicrosoftCarnegie Mellon University and the University of Washington have developed “GreenSKUs,” a sustainable approach to server design.

Unlike standard practices where components are discarded after 3-5 years of use, the GreenSKUs framework focuses on reusing parts like RAM (RAM) SSD modules and drives (SSD) from decommissioned servers.

Backwards compatibility paves the way for reuse

The foundation of GreenSKUs lies in leveraging backwards compatibility. Technological advances, such as Compute Express Link (CXL) controllers, enable compatibility between different generations of memory modules, such as DDR4 and DDR5, making it possible to reuse older components without significant performance loss.

To ensure reliability, researchers created a framework that evaluates components for reuse, identifying parts that will not result in unacceptable performance drops or excessive power consumption.

The team’s efforts go beyond hardware, introducing a software layer to further fine-tune the performance that determines which compute tasks are best suited for GreenSKUs versus standard Azure servers.

GreenSKUs are energy efficient AMD Bergamo processors along with reused RAM and SSDs from obsolete servers, helping to reduce emissions from hardware manufacturing.

According to the Association for Computing Machinery, the carbon footprint of cloud computing is poised to increase significantly, potentially contributing 20% of global emissions by 2030. Currently, cloud operations consume approximately 3% of energy worldwide per year.

The GreenSKUs project aligns with these efforts and researchers estimate an 8% reduction in embodied and operational carbon emissions for servers using this approach. On a large scale, the technique could reduce global carbon emissions by 0.1 to 0.2 percent, a reduction comparable to the emissions from all smartphone use in the United States.

However, reusing older components is not without challenges. Reused RAM modules introduced reduced latency and memory bandwidth, which researchers overcame through memory pooling techniques. Likewise, the lower read/write speeds of SSDs have been corrected using RAID striping.

However, not all limitations had a workaround. For example, AMD Bergamo processors, although energy efficient, had reduced cache performance. The researchers incorporated these tradeoffs into their larger framework to ensure that each server configuration could still meet Azure’s requirements.

Via IEEE Spectrum