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How Can Data Centers Survive Drought?

Technical Report · November 2014

DOI: 10.13140/2.1.2401.2486

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Mohammad Atiqul Islam Muhammad Zeeshan Shakir

University of Texas at Arlington University of the West of Scotland
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Athanasios Vasilakos Shaolei Ren

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Florida International University
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 How Can Data Centers Survive Drought?
Mohammad A. Islam
Florida International Univ.
Muhammad Z. Shakir
Texas A&M University at Qatar
Shaolei Ren
Florida International Univ.
Athanasios V. Vasilakos
Kuwait University

Abstract
Spreading across many parts of the world and presently hard striking
California, extended droughts could even potentially threaten reliable
electricity production and local water supplies, both of which are critical
for data center operation. While numerous efforts have been dedicated
to reducing data centers’ energy consumption, the enormity of data
centers’ water footprints is largely neglected and, if still left unchecked,
may handicap service availability during droughts. In this paper, we
propose a water-aware workload management algorithm, called WATCH
(WATer-constrained workload sCHeduling in data centers), which caps
data centers’ long-term water consumption by exploiting spatio-temporal
diversities of water efficiency and dynamically dispatching workloads
among distributed data centers. We demonstrate the effectiveness of
WATCH both analytically and empirically using simulations: based on
only online information, WATCH can result in a provably-low operational
cost while successfully capping water consumption under a desired level.
Our results also show that WATCH can cut water consumption by 20%
while only incurring a negligible cost increase even compared to state-of-
the-art cost-minimizing but water-oblivious solution. Sensitivity studies
are conducted to validate WATCH under various settings.

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