CAREER: Green Functions as a Service: Towards Sustainable and Efficient Distributed Computing Infrastructure

Cloud computing's growing carbon gas emissions footprint (2% of global emissions) threatens sustainability, especially with the rise of energy-hungry artificial intelligence (AI) and internet of things (IoT) applications. While renewable energy adoption is increasing, integrating it effectively into cyberinfrastructure remains a hurdle due to variability and location dependence.

The proposed work will lay the scientific and technical foundations of a distributed computing infrastructure which is both efficient and sustainable, using carbon as the first-order system-wide objective. It will enable the seamless deployment and use of low-carbon applications such as web services, AI, IoT, and data analytics. The models, software, and datasets produced through the research will be open-sourced and integrated into undergraduate curriculum and research.

Using new scalable pedagogical software such as "policy gyms", we will provide cross-disciplinary hands-on training to undergraduate students in the fields of computer engineering, AI, and sustainability.

The project will develop "Green Functions as a Service", a new abstraction for decarboninzing latency-sensitive applications on the edge-cloud continuum. Our approach will be grounded in fundamental principles of sustainability such as demand response, carbon pricing, and eco-feedback, and use modern AI techniques such as surrogate models for carbon modeling and optimization.

We will extend serverless computing with new capabilities such as polymorphic functions for carbon-efficient execution on heterogeneous CPU and GPU architectures. Our distributed resource management algorithms will use spatio-temporal carbon and workload modeling and optimization. The geographical load balancing will combine machine learning and carbon credits to provide carbon and performance management for distributed cyberinfrastructure.

Our multi-faceted research and education plan will introduce key sustainability principles to both system design and pedagogy, and contribute to a sustainable digital world.

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.