U-DUCT: Uncertainty-aware Dynamic Unified Carbon Modeling Tool for Datacenter Scheduling

Datacenters have been a significant source of global carbon emissions. Researchers have developed tools to quantify the emissions of datacenters, aiming to enable environmentally sustainable datacenter development. However, these tools include only some of the hardware components; focus primarily on the design stage; and do not account for the inherent uncertainties of hardware and software characteristics. To this end, we propose an uncertainty-aware dynamic unified carbon modeling tool, dubbed U-DUCT, which, to the best of our knowledge, is the first attempt to comprehensively understand the datacenter carbon emissions by addressing these limitations. Specifically, U-DUCT considers both well-studied computer servers and the rarely included storage and switches, which have a huge impact on carbon emissions. Moreover, we shift the focus of U-DUCT to the run-time stage and investigate the effect of uncertainties on both embodied and operational carbon estimations. By using U-DUCT to account for uncertainty, experiments on a small-scale cluster running real-world application workloads reveal new potential for reducing carbon emissions from computer servers, storage racks, and switches.