A Three-Step Methodology to Improve Domestic Energy Efficiency

Increasing energy prices and the greenhouse effect lead to more awareness of energy efficiency of electricity supply. During the last years, a lot of technologies have been developed to improve this efficiency. Next to large scale technologies such as windturbine parks, domestic technologies are developed. These domestic technologies can be divided in 1) Distributed Generation (DG), 2) Energy Storage and 3) Demand Side Load Management. Control algorithms optimizing a combination of these techniques can raise the energy reduction potential of the individual techniques. In this paper an overview of current research is given and a general concept is deducted. Based on this concept, a three-step optimization methodology is proposed using 1) offline local prediction, 2) offline global planning and 3) online local scheduling. The paper ends with results of simulations and field tests showing that the methodology is promising.\u

Towards Loosely-Coupled Programming on Petascale Systems

We have extended the Falkon lightweight task execution framework to make loosely coupled programming on petascale systems a practical and useful programming model. This work studies and measures the performance factors involved in applying this approach to enable the use of petascale systems by a broader user community, and with greater ease. Our work enables the execution of highly parallel computations composed of loosely coupled serial jobs with no modifications to the respective applications. This approach allows a new-and potentially far larger-class of applications to leverage petascale systems, such as the IBM Blue Gene/P supercomputer. We present the challenges of I/O performance encountered in making this model practical, and show results using both microbenchmarks and real applications from two domains: economic energy modeling and molecular dynamics. Our benchmarks show that we can scale up to 160K processor-cores with high efficiency, and can achieve sustained execution rates of thousands of tasks per second.Comment: IEEE/ACM International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage and Analysis (SuperComputing/SC) 200