Project - Status
FIT4Green ICT project saves up to 30% of energy
FIT4Green, a 30-month EU project started in January 2010, targets to provide at least 20% saving in direct server and network devices energy consumption and induce an additional 30% saving due to reduced cooling needs without compromising compliance with Service Level Agreements (SLA) and Quality of Service (QoS) metrics. Project’s first phase results are ready and they show direct energy savings starting from 6% up to 30%.
The project has created an energy-aware layer of plug-ins on top of the current data centres’ management tools to orchestrate the allocation of ICT resources and turning off unused equipments. FIT4Green is designed to be applicable to any data centre type; the plug-ins were validated in three representative data centres: service/enterprise portal at ENI, supercomputing grid at Jülich Supercomputing Centre, and cloud computing at HP.
The greatest energy savings, up to 30%, were achieved in service/enterprise portal. In cloud computing on average 18% savings were achieved. In service/enterprise portal and in cloud computing the energy savings were achieved by allocating the virtual machines in an energy-efficient manner and by turning off the unused servers. In service/enterprise portal, live migration of virtual machines was also used to optimise the number of servers. In supercomputing data centre the savings of 6% were based on setting the unused servers to low-power standby mode.
In addition to plug-ins and optimisation algorithms for the data centres, FIT4Green has also developed energy-efficient routing algorithms for the networks. In the first tests conducted at Imperial College, London, 5% savings in network devices were achieved. FIT4Green has also developed fine-grained energy consumption models for ICT components that are used for predicting the power consumption of ICT components under certain load. Business models, e.g. energy-aware SLAs, have also been considered.
In the second project phase, the first phase optimisation policies are refined and the optimisations are extended to cover the federated data centres, too. In addition to energy savings, the goal is to also reduce the CO2 emissions caused by the data centres. In the federated data centres, the workload allocation can favour data centres with cleaner energy sources, thus reducing the CO2 emissions. Phase 2 results are expected to be ready early next year.
FIT4Green is coordinated by GFI Informática with HP Italy Innovation Centre as the technological leader. Other partners include University of Passau, Jülich Supercomputing Centre, Imperial College London, VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland, University of Mannheim, Create-Net, Eni S.p.A., and Almende BV.
