GreenScale: Carbon Optimization for Edge Computing

Given billions of mobile users, the environmental impact of edge computing is significant. To address this, future applications need to execute computations on a green component which is fueled by renewable energy sources. However, because of the intermittent nature of the renewable energy sources, the carbon intensity of computing components can significantly vary with location and time of use. This poses a new challenge for edge applications – deciding when and where to run computations across consumer devices at the edge and servers in the cloud. Such scheduling decisions become more complicated with the amortization of the rising embodied emissions and stochastic runtime variance. This work proposes GreenScale, an intelligent execution scaling engine that accurately selects the carbon-optimal execution target for edge applications in different runtime environments. Our evaluation with three representative categories of applications (i.e., AI, Game, and AR/VR) demonstrate that the carbon emissions of the applications can be reduced by 35.2%, on average, with GreenScale.