The rapid development of the artificial intelligence industry has made discussions about the high energy consumption of the accompanying computing infrastructure relevant, but server components load the environment not only during operation, but also during the disposal process. Microsoft is trying to give a second life to decommissioned components to reduce their impact on the environment.
Microsoft, according to TechRadar, has joined forces with scientists from the universities of Washington and Carnegie Mellon to develop a technique for reusing a number of components from end-of-life server systems. The concept was designated GreenSKUs – literally, “green components”. The typical depreciation period of server components is measured in a period of three to five years, but in fact the same RAM modules can last much longer, it’s just that during this time they usually have time to be replaced with more productive ones. Solid state drives can also be used beyond their specified service life if they have an acceptable life expectancy.
Modern technologies like the CXL interface allow you to combine components from different generations in one system, with minimal loss in performance. The authors of the initiative have developed a system for selecting used server components for further use based on the criteria of the provided performance and energy consumption level. On the software side, computing loads that they will successfully cope with are selected for such “secondary” servers. AMD EPYC central processors from the Bergamo family provide acceptable performance with low power consumption, and in GreenSKUs server systems they are combined with used memory and SSD modules.
According to some estimates, cloud computing infrastructure now consumes up to 3% of the world’s annually generated electricity. By 2030, it will be responsible for 20% of carbon emissions. Using the GreenSKUs approach, emissions can be reduced by 8%, according to the authors of the initiative. If the approach is extended to the entire world, then emissions can be reduced by a couple of tenths of a percent, and this is comparable to the environmental impact of the entire fleet of smartphones operated in the United States.
From the point of view of the performance of server systems like GreenSKUs, one has to make tricks, trying to reduce the impact of increased delays in memory modules, and the performance of solid-state drives has to be increased by combining them into RAID arrays. In addition, AMD Bergamo processors have limited cache performance. Microsoft has to balance the characteristics of the entire complex of server systems so that GreenSKUs do not reduce it too obviously. The corporation uses this approach when developing its Azure infrastructure.