Modern data centers suffer from a growing carbon footprint due to insufficient support for environmental sustainability. While hardware accelerators and renewable energy have been utilized to enhance sustainability, addressing Quality of Service (QoS) degradation caused by renewable energy supply and hardware recycling remains challenging: (1) prior accelerators exhibit significant carbon footprints due to limited reconfigurability and inability to adapt to renewable energy fluctuations; (2) integrating recycled NAND flash chips in data centers poses challenges due to their short lifetime, increasing energy consumption; (3) the absence of a sustainability estimator impedes data centers and users in evaluating and improving their environmental impact. This study aims to improve system support for environmentally sustainable data centers by proposing a reconfigurable hardware accelerator for intensive computing primitives and developing a fractional NAND flash cell to extend the lifetime of recycled flash chips while supporting graceful capacity degradation. We also introduce a sustainability estimator to evaluate user task energy consumption and promote sustainable practices. We present our preliminary results and recognize this as an ongoing initiative with significant potential to advance environmentally sustainable computing in data centers and stimulate further exploration in this critical research domain.

翻译：现代数据中心因缺乏对环境可持续性的充分支持而面临日益增长的碳足迹问题。尽管硬件加速器与可再生能源已被用于提升可持续性，但应对可再生能源供应与硬件回收所引发的服务质量（QoS）劣化仍具挑战：（1）现有加速器因可重构性有限且无法适应可再生能源波动，存在显著的碳足迹；（2）在数据中心集成回收的NAND闪存芯片因其寿命短、能耗增加而面临挑战；（3）缺乏可持续性评估工具阻碍了数据中心与用户评估及改善其环境影响的进程。本研究通过提出面向密集计算原语的可重构硬件加速器，并开发可延长回收闪存芯片寿命同时支持容量优雅降级的分数型NAND闪存单元，旨在改进环境可持续数据中心的系统支持。我们还引入可持续性评估器以量化用户任务能耗并推广可持续实践。本文展示了初步成果，并将此视为一项持续研究——其在推动数据中心环境可持续计算及激发该关键领域探索方面具有重大潜力。