# SHIELD: Sustainable Hybrid Evolutionary Learning Framework for Carbon, Wastewater, and Energy-Aware Data Center Management

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2308.13086 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.13086/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 2 of its 57 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 24 Aug 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [Learning-based Application-Agnostic 3D NoC Design for Heterogeneous Manycore Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.08869/) (2018)
- [Energy and Network Aware Workload Management for Geographically Distributed Data Centers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.00066/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 3 of 3)

- [Sustainable Carbon-Aware and Water-Efficient LLM Scheduling in Geo-Distributed Cloud Datacenters](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.23554/) (2025)
- [A Framework for SLO, Carbon, and Wastewater-Aware Sustainable FaaS Cloud Platform Management](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.11875/) (2024)
- [InFactPlanner: Planning Sustainable Geo-Distributed LLM Data Centers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.12915/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Today's cloud data centers are often distributed geographically to provide robust data services. But these geo-distributed data centers (GDDCs) have a significant associated environmental impact due to their increasing carbon emissions and water usage, which needs to be curtailed. Moreover, the energy costs of operating these data centers continue to rise. This paper proposes a novel framework to co-optimize carbon emissions, water footprint, and energy costs of GDDCs, using a hybrid workload management framework called SHIELD that integrates machine learning guided local search with a decomposition-based evolutionary algorithm. Our framework considers geographical factors and time-based differences in power generation/use, costs, and environmental impacts to intelligently manage workload distribution across GDDCs and data center operation. Experimental results show that SHIELD can realize 34.4x speedup and 2.1x improvement in Pareto Hypervolume while reducing the carbon footprint by up to 3.7x, water footprint by up to 1.8x, energy costs by up to 1.3x, and a cumulative improvement across all objectives (carbon, water, cost) of up to 4.8x compared to the state-of-the-art.