Opportunities of Renewable Energy Powered DNN Inference

With the proliferation of the adoption of renewable energy in powering data centers, addressing the challenges of such energy sources has attracted researchers from academia and industry. One of the challenging characteristics of data centers with renewable energy is the intrinsic power fluctuation. Fluctuation in renewable power supply inevitably requires adjusting applications' power consumption, which can lead to undesirable performance degradation. This paper investigates the possible control knobs to manage the power and performance of a popular cloud workload, i.e., deep neural network inference, under the fluctuating power supply. Through empirical profiling and trace-driven simulations, we observe the different impact levels associated with inference control knobs on throughput, under varying power supplies. Based on our observations, we provide a list of future research directions to leverage the control knobs to achieve high throughput.