Application of Genetic Algorithm to Maximise Clean Energy Usage for Data Centres

The communications industry is currently witnessing a continued increase in energy consumption, and this trend is predicted to increase even more in the coming years. This is largely driven by the popularity of the Internet, which continues to attract growing numbers of users who now rely on the Internet as part of their daily lives. A major factor behind this attraction is the multitude of services available on the Internet, ranging from web based services (e.g. facebook) to heavy power consuming services such as multimedia (e.g. youtube, IPTV). Therefore the data centres housing these services are seeing their energy consumption increase proportionally, now leading researchers to actively search for solutions to improve the energy efficiency of data centres. In this paper we propose a green data centre solution that makes data centres and services prioritise the usage of clean, renewable energy sources. The solution allows data centres to share information regarding renewable energy and cooling, in order to exploit variance between different countries energy and temperature profiles by moving services between data centres. We employ a genetic-algorithm to find the optimal placement of services on the data centres.