Assessing anthropogenic heat flux of public cloud data centers: current and future trends

Hamza Baniata; Sami Mahmood; Attila Kertesz

doi:10.7717/peerj-cs.478

Assessing anthropogenic heat flux of public cloud data centers: current and future trends

PeerJ Comput Sci. 2021 May 5:7:e478. doi: 10.7717/peerj-cs.478. eCollection 2021.

Authors

Hamza Baniata¹, Sami Mahmood^{2

3}, Attila Kertesz¹

Affiliations

¹ Software Engineering Department, University of Szeged, Szeged, Hungary.
² Physics Department, The University of Jordan, Amman, Jordan.
³ Department of Physics and Astronomy, Michigan State University, East Lansing, MI, United States of America.

Abstract

Global average temperature had been significantly increasing during the past century, mainly due to the growing rates of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, leading to a global warming problem. Many research works indicated other causes of this problem, such as the anthropogenic heat flux (AHF). Cloud computing (CC) data centers (DCs), for example, perform massive computational tasks for end users, leading to emit huge amounts of waste heat towards the surrounding (local) atmosphere in the form of AHF. Out of the total power consumption of a public cloud DC, nearly 10% is wasted in the form of heat. In this paper, we quantitatively and qualitatively analyze the current state of AHF emissions of the top three cloud service providers (i.e., Google, Azure and Amazon) according to their average energy consumption and the global distribution of their DCs. In this study, we found that Microsoft Azure DCs emit the highest amounts of AHF, followed by Amazon and Google, respectively. We also found that Europe is the most negatively affected by AHF of public DCs, due to its small area relative to other continents and the large number of cloud DCs within. Accordingly, we present mean estimations of continental AHF density per square meter. Following our results, we found that the top three clouds (with waste heat at a rate of 1,720.512 MW) contribute an average of more than 2.8% out of averaged continental AHF emissions. Using this percentage, we provide future trends estimations of AHF densities in the period [2020-2100]. In one of the presented scenarios, our estimations predict that by 2100, AHF of public clouds DCs will reach 0.01 Wm^-2.

Keywords: Anthropogenic heat flux; Cloud computing; Data centers; Global warming.

Grants and funding

This research was supported by the Hungarian Government and the European Regional Development Fund under the grant number GINOP-2.3.2-15-2016-00037 (Internet of Living Things), by the Hungarian Scientific Research Fund under the grant number OTKA FK 131793, and by the University of Szeged Open Access Fund under the grant number 5118. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.