  Modern data centers suffer from a growing carbon footprint due to
insufficient support for environmental sustainability. While hardware
accelerators and renewable energy have been utilized to enhance sustainability,
addressing Quality of Service (QoS) degradation caused by renewable energy
supply and hardware recycling remains challenging: (1) prior accelerators
exhibit significant carbon footprints due to limited reconfigurability and
inability to adapt to renewable energy fluctuations; (2) integrating recycled
NAND flash chips in data centers poses challenges due to their short lifetime,
increasing energy consumption; (3) the absence of a sustainability estimator
impedes data centers and users in evaluating and improving their environmental
impact. This study aims to improve system support for environmentally
sustainable data centers by proposing a reconfigurable hardware accelerator for
intensive computing primitives and developing a fractional NAND flash cell to
extend the lifetime of recycled flash chips while supporting graceful capacity
degradation. We also introduce a sustainability estimator to evaluate user task
energy consumption and promote sustainable practices. We present our
preliminary results and recognize this as an ongoing initiative with
significant potential to advance environmentally sustainable computing in data
centers and stimulate further exploration in this critical research domain.
