Collaborative Research: DESC: Type I: A User-Interactive Approach to Water Management for Sustainable Data Centers: From Water Efficiency to Self-Sufficiency

Amid the increasingly common megadroughts and global freshwater supply challenges, the massive water footprint of data centers makes them a critical and valuable player in the collective effort toward water sustainability. As such, it is imperative to adopt new approaches for data center management that explicitly address the water footprint as a sustainability metric. Nonetheless, existing research on data center water efficiency only takes users' compute demands as an external and uncontrollable input, keeping users entirely agnostic to their water footprint. This not only misses a significant opportunity for user-side demand management but also prevents environmentally conscious users from proactively exploiting their workload flexibility to contribute to data center water sustainability. To overcome this limitation and bridge the gap between data center operators and users, this project proposes a new user-interactive approach to data center water management, where users are provided with clear visibility of their fine-grained water footprints that enable their active contribution to water sustainability. Specifically, this project develops: (1) a fair and accurate water accounting system for data centers both at the user and facility levels; (2) a scalable user-interactive resource management approach that extracts users' scheduling flexibilities for water sustainability; and (3) an efficient online algorithm that achieves data center water self-sufficiency by leveraging alternative water sources such as rainwater harvesting. This project contributes to several key goals of the Design for Environmental Sustainability in Computing (DESC) program. It enables environmentally conscious clouds to tap into users' workload scheduling flexibility and offers unparalleled visibility into the water footprint of a user's digital presence by developing new user-level sustainability metrics. These insights can encourage and empower a new generation of sustainability-aware users and drive digital infrastructure providers to adapt and enhance their business practices to align with environmental sustainability objectives. Additionally, by alleviating the stress on freshwater sources and utilities, this project contributes to water conservation efforts and environmental resilience in drought-prone regions. To increase the widespread impact of this project, the tools and products developed will be shared publicly and integrated into existing curricula. Finally, this project actively promotes inclusivity and diversity by involving women, underrepresented minority groups in STEM, and persons with disabilities, fostering a collaborative and inclusive research environment. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.