CASPER: Carbon-Aware Scheduling and Provisioning for Distributed Web Services - ACM 2023 Green and Sustainable Computing Conference (IGSC’23)

Oct 3, 2026

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Modern distributed web services can adapt processing location, time, and intensity to match renewable and low-carbon energy availability, such as varying carbon intensity across cloud regions. Distributed load balancing can migrate workloads toward regions with cleaner electricity to reduce carbon footprint. CASPER is a carbon-aware scheduling and provisioning system that minimizes distributed web services’ carbon emissions while respecting service level objectives. CASPER formulates the task as multi-objective optimization with carbon intensity and latency constraints, achieving up to 70% reductions without latency degradation.

LanguageEnglish

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Pages8

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Abstract

1 Introduction

Sustainability and carbon-aware cloud platforms

Motivation for spatial and temporal workload flexibility

CASPER: Carbon-Aware Scheduling and Provisioning for Distributed Web Services Downloaded from: [https://research.chalmers.se](https://research.chalmers.se), 2026-10-03 20:20 UTC Citation for the original published paper (version of record): Souza, A., Jasoria, S., Chakrabarty, B. et al (2023) . CASPER: Carbon-Aware Scheduling and Provisioning for Distributed Web Services. ACM International Conference Proceeding Series, 28 October 2023: 67-73. [http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/3634769.3634812](http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/3634769.3634812) N. B. When citing this work, cite the original published paper. research.chalmers.se offers the possibility of retrieving research publications produced at Chalmers University of Technology. It covers all kind of research output: articles, dissertations, conference papers, reports etc. since 2004. research.chalmers.se is administrated and maintained by Chalmers Library (article starts on next page) CASPER: Carbon-Aware Scheduling and Provisioning for Distributed Web Services Abel Souza, ShrutiJasoria, Basundhara Chakrabarty, David Irwin, Prashant Shenoy University of Massachusetts Amherst USA ABSTRACT There has been a significant societal push towards sustainable practices, including in computing. Modern interactive workloads such as geo-distributed web-services exhibit various spatiotemporal and performance flexibility, enabling the possibility to adapt the location, time, and intensity of processing to align with the availability of renewable and low-carbon energy. An example is a web application hosted across multiple cloud regions, each with varying carbon intensity based on their local electricity mix. Distributed loadbalancing enables the exploitation of low-carbon energy through load migration across regions, reducing web applications carbon footprint. In this paper, we present CASPER, a carbon-aware scheduling and provisioning system that primarily minimizes the carbon footprint of distributed web services while also respecting their Service Level Objectives (SLO) . We formulate CASPER as an multi-objective optimization problem that considers both the variable carbon intensity and latency constraints of the network. Our evaluation reveals the significant potential of CASPER in achieving substantial reductions in carbon emissions. Compared to baseline methods, CASPER demonstrates improvements of up to 70% with no latency performance degradation. CCS CONCEPTS • Computer systems organization → Cloud computing; Special purpose systems. ACM Reference Format: Abel Souza, ShrutiJasoria, Basundhara Chakrabarty, David Irwin, Prashant Shenoy and Alexander Bridgwater, Axel Lundberg, Filip Skogh, Ahmed Ali-Eldin. 2023. CASPER: Carbon-Aware Scheduling and Provisioning for Distributed Web Services. In THE 14th international Green and Sustainable Computing Conference (IGSC’23), October 28–29, 2023, Toronto, ON, Canada. ACM, New York, NY, USA, 7 pages. [https://doi.org/10.1145/3634769.3634812](https://doi.org/10.1145/3634769.3634812) 1 INTRODUCTION In recent years, the global focus on sustainability and environmental responsibility has brought renewable energy to the forefront of the discussions on energy systems, leading to an increased focus on reducing the carbon footprint of cloud platforms in both research and industry [16, 17, 29, 31, 38] . Although there has been Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission [and/or a fee. Request permissions from permissions@acm.org](and/or a fee. Request permis

FAQs

What problem does CASPER address in distributed cloud services?

CASPER targets reducing the carbon footprint of distributed web services by scheduling and provisioning workloads based on variable carbon intensity across regions while keeping latency requirements in mind.

How does CASPER ensure both carbon reduction and performance requirements?

CASPER formulates scheduling as a multi-objective optimization problem that considers both carbon intensity and latency constraints, while also respecting service level objectives (SLO).

What results does the paper report compared with baseline methods?

The evaluation shows CASPER can improve carbon emissions by up to 70% compared to baseline methods, with no latency performance degradation.

Oct 3, 2026

Upload by Riley