A Study on Green Cloud Computing – An Overview

Abstract

Cloud computing provides computing power and resources as a service to users across the globe. This scheme was introduced as a means to an end for customer’s worldwide, providing high performance at a cheaper cost when compared to dedicated high-performance computing machines. This provision requires huge data-centers to be tightly-coupled with the system, the increasing use of which yields heavy consumption of energy and huge emission of CO2. Since energy has been a prime concern of late, this issue generated the importance of green cloud computing that provides techniques and algorithms to reduce energy wastage by incorporating its reuse. In this survey we discuss key techniques to reduce the energy consumption and CO2 emission that can cause severe health issues. We begin with a discussion on green matrices appropriate for data-centers and then throw light on green scheduling algorithms that facilitate reduction in energy consumption and CO2 emission levels in the existing systems. At the same time the various existing architectures related to green cloud also discussed in this paper with their pros and cons. Cloud computing is a highly scalable and cost-effective infrastructure for running HPC, enterprise and Web applications. However, the growing demand of Cloud infrastructure has drastically increased the energy consumption of data centers, which has become a critical issue. High energy consumption not only translates to high operational cost, which reduces the profit margin of Cloud providers, but also leads to high carbon emissions which is not environmentally friendly. Hence, energy-efficient solutions are required to minimize the impact of Cloud computing on the environment. In order to design such solutions, deep analysis of Cloud is required with respect to their power efficiency. Thus, in this study, we discuss various elements of Clouds which contribute to the total energy consumption and how it is addressed in the literature. We also discuss the implication of these solutions for future research directions to enable green Cloud computing. The study also explains the role of Cloud users in achieving this goal.