Toward Optimal Carbon-Aware Scheduling of Server Replacement

Server replacement scheduling decisions can significantly impact carbon emissions in data centers. However, commonly used periodic strategies are often sub-optimal in terms of total carbon emissions. In this article, we formulate the carbon-aware server replacements problem mathematically and investigate the structure of the optimal replacement policy. Based on our theoretical analysis, we then propose a simple adaptive online policy that yields significantly lower carbon emissions than periodic strategies and achieves near-optimal results across a variety of simulated scenarios.