Recent improvements in energy efficiency and renewable energy integration have increased the relative importance of embodied carbon in data centers, motivating improved provisioning strategies. Conventional approaches primarily minimize operational energy, but this perspective is increasingly insufficient for sustainability. In this paper, we propose carbon depreciation models to encourage longer hardware lifetimes. Carbon depreciation assigns a larger portion of embodied carbon to newly provisioned servers, discouraging unnecessary deployment of new hardware. As a result, new servers are provisioned mainly for jobs with strict quality-of-service (QoS) constraints, while older servers, whose embodied carbon has largely been recovered, are used for other workloads. We further argue that both embodied carbon and operational carbon from server idle time should be recovered during active jobs, encouraging provisioning strategies that maintain high utilization. We show that prior carbon accounting strategies can be counterproductive: under a greedy scheduler minimizing carbon under QoS constraints, jobs are priced as 25% cheaper on new hardware than on older hardware. In contrast, our approach uses a greedy scheduler that prioritizes older hardware through non-linear carbon depreciation, promoting sustainable provisioning. Experimental results show carbon reductions of 28-57%, depending on server lifetime assumptions.

翻译：近年来，能效提升与可再生能源整合取得了显著进展，这使得数据中心的隐含碳排放相对重要性日益凸显，从而激发了更优的资源调配策略研究。传统方法主要致力于降低运营能耗，但这种视角对于实现可持续性已愈发不足。本文提出碳折旧模型，旨在延长硬件使用寿命。碳折旧将较大比例的隐含碳排放分配给新部署的服务器，从而抑制不必要的新硬件投入。由此，新服务器主要部署于具有严格服务质量约束的任务，而隐含碳已基本折旧的旧服务器则用于处理其他工作负载。我们进一步论证，服务器闲置期间产生的隐含碳与运营碳均应在活跃任务中实现折旧，这促使资源调配策略维持高利用率。研究表明，先前的碳核算方法可能适得其反：在服务质量约束下以最小化碳排放为目标的贪婪调度策略中，新硬件上的任务定价比旧硬件低25%。与之相反，我们的方法采用优先调度旧硬件的贪婪调度器，通过非线性碳折旧推动可持续的资源调配。实验结果表明，基于不同的服务器使用寿命假设，碳排放可减少28%至57%。