Smoother: A Smooth Renewable Power-Aware Middleware

Xinxin Liu, Yu Hua, Xue Liu, Ling Yang, Yuanyuan Sun

Abstract: The large electricity bills and the negative impacts on environments accelerate the use of renewable power to supply systems. However, frequent fluctuation and intermittency of renewable power often cause the challenges in terms of the stability of both electricity grid and systems, as well as decrease the utilization of renewable power. Existing schemes fail to alleviate the renewable power fluctuation, which is caused by the essential properties of renewable power. In order to address this problem, we propose an efficient and easy-to-use smooth renewable power-aware middleware, called Smoother, which consists of Flexible Smoothing (FS) and Active Delay (AD). First, in order to smooth the fluctuation of renewable power, Flexible Smoothing carries out the optimized charge/discharge operation via computing the minimum variance of the renewable power that is supplied to systems per interval. Second, Active Delay improves the utilization of renewable power via actively adjusting the execution time of deferrable workloads. Extensive experimental results via examining the traces of real-world systems demonstrate that Smoother significantly reduces the negative impact of renewable power fluctuations on systems and improves the utilization of renewable power by 169.85% on average. We have released the source codes for public use.