Clover: Toward Sustainable AI with Carbon-Aware Machine Learning Inference Service

Abstract

This paper presents a solution to the challenge of mitigating carbon emissions from large-scale high performance computing (HPC) systems and datacenters that host machine learning (ML) inference services. ML inference is critical to modern technology products, but it is also a significant contributor to datacenter compute cycles and carbon emissions. We introduce Clover, a carbon-friendly ML inference service runtime system that balances performance, accuracy, and carbon emissions through mixed-quality models and GPU resource partitioning. Our experimental results demonstrate that Clover is effective in substantially reducing carbon emissions while maintaining high accuracy and meeting service level agreement (SLA) targets. Therefore, it is a promising solution toward achieving carbon neutrality in HPC systems and datacenters.