Energy Efficiency in the ICT - Profiling Power Consumption in Desktop Computer Systems

Energy awareness in the ICT has become an important issue. Focusing on software, recent work suggested the existence of a relationship between power consumption, software configuration and usage patterns in computer systems. The aim of this work was collecting and analysing power consumption data of general-purpose computer systems, simulating common usage scenarios, in order to extract a power consumption profile for each scenario. We selected two desktop systems of different generations as test machines. Meanwhile, we developed 11 usage scenarios, and conducted several test runs of them, collecting power consumption data by means of a power meter. Our analysis resulted in an estimation of a power consumption value for each scenario and software application used, obtaining that each single scenario introduced an overhead from 2 to 11 Watts, which corresponds to a percentage increase that can reach up to 20% on recent and more powerful systems. We determined that software and its usage patterns impact consistently on the power consumption of computer systems. Further work will be devoted to evaluate how power consumption is affected by the usage of specific system resource

Experimental evaluation of two software countermeasures against fault attacks

Injection of transient faults can be used as a way to attack embedded systems. On embedded processors such as microcontrollers, several studies showed that such a transient fault injection with glitches or electromagnetic pulses could corrupt either the data loads from the memory or the assembly instructions executed by the circuit. Some countermeasure schemes which rely on temporal redundancy have been proposed to handle this issue. Among them, several schemes add this redundancy at assembly instruction level. In this paper, we perform a practical evaluation for two of those countermeasure schemes by using a pulsed electromagnetic fault injection process on a 32-bit microcontroller. We provide some necessary conditions for an efficient implementation of those countermeasure schemes in practice. We also evaluate their efficiency and highlight their limitations. To the best of our knowledge, no experimental evaluation of the security of such instruction-level countermeasure schemes has been published yet.Comment: 6 pages, 2014 IEEE International Symposium on Hardware-Oriented Security and Trust (HOST), Arlington : United States (2014

The Hidden Energy Cost of Web Advertising

Advertising is an important source of income for many websites. To get the attention of the unsuspecting (and probably uninterested) visitors, web advertisements (ads) tend to use elaborate animations and graphics. Depending on the specific technology being used, displaying such ads on the visitor's screen may require a vast amount of CPU-power. Since present day desktop-CPUs can easily use 100W or more, ads may consume a substantial amount of energy. Although it is important for environmental reasons to reduce energy consumption, increasing the number of ads seems to be counterproductive.\ud The goal of this paper is to investigate the power consumption of web advertisements. For this purpose we used an energy meter to measure the differences in PC power consumption while browsing the web normally (thus with ads enabled), and while browsing with ads being blocked.\ud To simulate normal web browsing, we created a browser-based tool called AutoBrowse, which periodically opens an URL from a predefined list. To block advertisements, we used the Adblock Plus extension for Mozilla Firefox. To measure also power consumption with other browsers, we used in addition the Apache HTTP server and its mod_proxy module to act as an ad-blocking proxy server.\ud The measurements on several PCs and browsers show that, on average, the additional energy consumption to display web advertisements is 2.5W. To put this number into perspective, we calculated that the total amount of energy used to display web advertisement is equivalent of the total yearly electricity consumption of nearly 2000 households in the Netherlands. It takes 3,6 “average” wind turbines to generate this amount of energy

The design of an indirect method for the human presence monitoring in the intelligent building

This article describes the design and verification of the indirect method of predicting the course of CO2 concentration (ppm) from the measured temperature variables Tindoor (degrees C) and the relative humidity rH(indoor) (%) and the temperature T-outdoor (degrees C) using the Artificial Neural Network (ANN) with the Bayesian Regulation Method (BRM) for monitoring the presence of people in the individual premises in the Intelligent Administrative Building (IAB) using the PI System SW Tool (PI-Plant Information enterprise information system). The CA (Correlation Analysis), the MSE (Root Mean Squared Error) and the DTW (Dynamic Time Warping) criteria were used to verify and classify the results obtained. Within the proposed method, the LMS adaptive filter algorithm was used to remove the noise of the resulting predicted course. In order to verify the method, two long-term experiments were performed, specifically from February 1 to February 28, 2015, from June 1 to June 28, 2015 and from February 8 to February 14, 2015. For the best results of the trained ANN BRM within the prediction of CO2, the correlation coefficient R for the proposed method was up to 92%. The verification of the proposed method confirmed the possibility to use the presence of people of the monitored IAB premises for monitoring. The designed indirect method of CO2 prediction has potential for reducing the investment and operating costs of the IAB in relation to the reduction of the number of implemented sensors in the IAB within the process of management of operational and technical functions in the IAB. The article also describes the design and implementation of the FEIVISUAL visualization application for mobile devices, which monitors the technological processes in the IAB. This application is optimized for Android devices and is platform independent. The application requires implementation of an application server that communicates with the data server and the application developed. The data of the application developed is obtained from the data storage of the PI System via a PI Web REST API (Application Programming Integration) client.Web of Science8art. no. 2

Studies of Single-Molecule Dynamics in Microorganisms

Fluorescence microscopy is one of the most extensively used techniques in the life sciences. Considering the non-invasive sample preparation, enabling live-cell compliant imaging, and the specific fluorescence labeling, allowing for a specific visualization of virtually any cellular compound, it is possible to localize even a single molecule in living cells. This makes modern fluorescence microscopy a powerful toolbox. In the recent decades, the development of new, "super-resolution" fluorescence microscopy techniques, which surpass the diffraction limit, revolutionized the field. Single-Molecule Localization Microscopy (SMLM) is a class of super-resolution microscopy methods and it enables resolution of down to tens of nanometers. SMLM methods like Photoactivated Localization Microscopy (PALM), (direct) Stochastic Optical Reconstruction Microscopy ((d)STORM), Ground-State Depletion followed by Individual Molecule Return (GSDIM) and Point Accumulation for Imaging in Nanoscale Topography (PAINT) have allowed to investigate both, the intracellular spatial organization of proteins and to observe their real-time dynamics at the single-molecule level in live cells. The focus of this thesis was the development of novel tools and strategies for live-cell SingleParticle Tracking PALM (sptPALM) imaging and implementing them for biological research. In the first part of this thesis, I describe the development of new Photoconvertible Fluorescent Proteins (pcFPs) which are optimized for sptPALM lowering the phototoxic damage caused by the imaging procedure. Furthermore, we show that we can utilize them together with Photoactivatable Fluorescent Proteins (paFPs) to enable multi-target labeling and read-out in a single color channel, which significantly simplifies the sample preparation and imaging routines as well as data analysis of multi-color PALM imaging of live cells. In parallel to developing new fluorescent proteins, I developed a high throughput data analysis pipeline. I have implemented this pipeline in my second project, described in the second part of this thesis, where I have investigated the protein organization and dynamics of the CRISPR-Cas antiviral defense mechanism of bacteria in vivo at a high spatiotemporal level with the sptPALM approach. I was successful to show the differences in the target search dynamics of the CRISPR effector complexes as well as of single Cas proteins for different target complementarities. I have also first data describing longer-lasting bound-times between effector complex and their potential targets in vivo, for which only in vitro data has been available till today. In summary, this thesis is a significant contribution for both, the advances of current sptPALM imaging methods, as well as for the understanding of the native behavior of CRISPR-Cas systems in vivo

Virtual Pitch and Pitch Shifts in Church Bells

It is well established that musical sounds comprising multiple partials with frequencies approximately in the ratio of small integers give rise to a strong sensation of pitch even if the lowest or fundamental partial is missing—the so-called virtual pitch effect. Experiments on thirty test subjects demonstrate that this virtual pitch is shifted significantly by changes in the spacing of the constituent partials. The experiments measured pitch by comparison of sounds of similar timbre and were automated so that they could be performed remotely across the Internet. Analysis of the test sounds used shows that the pitch shifts are not predicted by Terhardt’s classic model of virtual pitch. The test sounds used were modelled on the sounds of church bells, but a further experiment on seventeen test subjects showed that changes in partial amplitude only had a minor effect on the pitch shifts observed, and that a pitch shift was still observed when two of the lowest frequency partials were removed, so that the effects reported are of general interest

Synthesis of time-to-amplitude converter by mean coevolution with adaptive parameters

Copyright © 2011 the authors and Scientific Research Publishing Inc. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)The challenging task to synthesize automatically a time-to-amplitude converter, which unites by its functionality several digital circuits, has been successfully solved with the help of a novel methodology. The proposed approach is based on a paradigm according to which the substructures are regarded as additional mutation types and when ranged with other mutations form a new adaptive individual-level mutation technique. This mutation approach led to the discovery of an original coevolution strategy that is characterized by very low selection rates. Parallel island-model evolution has been running in a hybrid competitive-cooperative interaction throughout two incremental stages. The adaptive population size is applied for synchronization of the parallel evolutions