Energy Aware Computer Systems and Networks

When: Wednesday, July 31, 2013
Where: PGH 232
Time: 2:00 PM

Speaker: Dr. Erol Gelenbe, Imperial College, London

Host: Dr. Jehan-Francois Paris

ICT is becoming one of the main culprits for CO2 emissions, already on a par with air travel since 2007. Energy consumption by ICT is estimated to increase by 4% a year, despite the increasing energy efficiency of electronic and computer equipment, due to the ever- increasing usage of computers and telecommunications. On the positive side, ICT offers the potential to manage energy more efficiently, help better match energy supply and demand, and dynamically substitute renewable energy sources in the place of fossil fuels. At the same time, one would like to think that ICT is saving energy and CO2 emissions in other areas (such as transport), by substituting on-line activities for physical activities, such as working at home rather than commuting to an office. But such trends are difficult to identify, while the recent economic crisis in Europe and the USA has definitely had an impact on energy consumption in industry and other fields of activity. Within ICT itself, communications represent close to 25% of energy consumption, with data centres accounting for another 20% or so, the rest being attributed to PCs, terminal devices and office equipment including local networks. This lecture will focus on the ICT aspects of energy consumption from a performance engineering perspective, and show how some of our established methods, with measurements, can be used to understand the trade-offs between QoS and energy consumption, and help reduce the energy consumption in servers and networks.

Bio:
Erol Gelenbe FIEEE, FACM, FIET, is the “Dennis Gabor Professor” in Electrical and Electronic Engineering at Imperial College. He has introduced performance modelling methods such as diffusion approximations, G-networks, and contributed software tools including FLEXSIM and QNAP used in industry or academia. His designs or inventions include the SYCOMORE multiprocessor packet switching architecture, the first fibre-optics random access network XANTHOS, and the first implemented Software Defined Network CPN (Cognitive Packet Network). He currently works on the interaction between Energy Consumption and Quality of Service, and the security of Mobile Networks. He has won awards in France, Belgium, Italy, Turkey, the USA and UK, including the Grand Prix France Telecom (French Academy of Sciences), ACM’s SIGMETRICS Life-Time Achievement Award, the IET’s Oliver Lodge Medal, the Parlar Science Award, honorary doctorates from the Universities of Liege, Bogazici and Roma-Tor Vergata. An elected member of the French National Academy of Engineering, the Science Academies of Hungary and Poland, and the Science Academy of Istanbul, Turkey, his current projects include EU Project NEMESYS on Mobile Network Security, EPSRC ECROPS on Energy Savings and Harvesting in ICT, a MoD/DSTL on Energy Savings, and Smart Networks at the Edge of the European Institute of Technology. He is currently Chair or TPC chair for several conferences and associate editor of Acta Informatica, IEEE Networks, ACM Ubiquity, Performance Evaluation, IEEE Trans. on Cloud Computing, Theory and Applications of Informatics, Telecommunication Systems, Info Communications Journal.

For recent publications, see http://san.ee.ic.ac.uk and http://sa.ee.ic.ac.uk.