Energy challenges for ICT

The energy consumption from the expanding use of information and communications technology (ICT) is unsustainable with present drivers, and it will impact heavily on the future climate change. However, ICT devices have the potential to contribute signi - cantly to the reduction of CO2 emission and enhance resource e ciency in other sectors, e.g., transportation (through intelligent transportation and advanced driver assistance systems and self-driving vehicles), heating (through smart building control), and manu- facturing (through digital automation based on smart autonomous sensors). To address the energy sustainability of ICT and capture the full potential of ICT in resource e - ciency, a multidisciplinary ICT-energy community needs to be brought together cover- ing devices, microarchitectures, ultra large-scale integration (ULSI), high-performance computing (HPC), energy harvesting, energy storage, system design, embedded sys- tems, e cient electronics, static analysis, and computation. In this chapter, we introduce challenges and opportunities in this emerging eld and a common framework to strive towards energy-sustainable ICT

Simulation-based assessment of thermal aware computation of a bespoke data centre

The role of Data Centres (DCs) as global electricity consumers is growing rapidly due to the exponential increase of computational demand that modern times require. Control strategies that minimize energy consumption while guaranteeing optimal operation conditions in DC are essential to achieve sustainable and energy efficient DCs. Unfortunately, the development and testing of novel control strategies are often slowed down, if not discarded. This is generally due to the lack of access caused by safety and economic reasons. Alternatively, simulation experiments represent a “safe” virtual environment to test novel control strategies, accelerating the process for their implementation in physical DCs. The virtual DC testbed, originated in the GENiC project, supports the development and dynamic testing of control and energy management algorithms. This paper introduces its features and describes its functionality through a simulation-based assessment of thermal aware computation strategy. For this, the virtual DC will be based on a bespoke DC located in Cork (Ireland). This DC has 30 kW capacity, 40 m2 floor area and its layout follows a hot aisle - cold aisle arrangement without containment. The performance the IT Workload allocation under different scenarios and their influence both on the whitespace environment and overall DC performance are evaluated and quantified. Finally, the benefits of a coordinated operation between the thermal and the IT workload managements are discussed

Smart Grid Technologies in Europe: An Overview

The old electricity network infrastructure has proven to be inadequate, with respect to modern challenges such as alternative energy sources, electricity demand and energy saving policies. Moreover, Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) seem to have reached an adequate level of reliability and flexibility in order to support a new concept of electricity network—the smart grid. In this work, we will analyse the state-of-the-art of smart grids, in their technical, management, security, and optimization aspects. We will also provide a brief overview of the regulatory aspects involved in the development of a smart grid, mainly from the viewpoint of the European Unio

Enabling Green Energy awareness in Interactive Cloud Application

International audienceWith the proliferation of Cloud computing, data centers have to urgently face energy consumption issues. Although recent efforts such as the integration of renewable energy to data centers or energy efficient techniques in (virtual) machines contribute to the reduction of carbon footprint, creating green energy awareness around Interactive Cloud Applications by smartly using the presence of green energy has not been yet addressed. By awareness, we mean the inherited capability of Software-as-a-Service applications to dynamically adapt with the availability of green energy and to reduce energy consumption while green energy is scarce or absent. In this paper, we present two application controllers based on different metrics (e.g., availability of green energy, response time, user experience level). Based on extensive experiments with a real application benchmark and workloads in Grid'5000, results suggest that providers revenue can be increased as high as 64%, while 13% brown energy can be reduced without deprovisioning any physical or virtual resources at IaaS layer and 17 fold increment of performance can be guaranteed

Sustainable Edge Computing: Challenges and Future Directions

An increasing amount of data is being injected into the network from IoT (Internet of Things) applications. Many of these applications, developed to improve society's quality of life, are latency-critical and inject large amounts of data into the network. These requirements of IoT applications trigger the emergence of Edge computing paradigm. Currently, data centers are responsible for a global energy use between 2% and 3%. However, this trend is difficult to maintain, as bringing computing infrastructures closer to the edge of the network comes with its own set of challenges for energy efficiency. In this paper, we propose our approach for the sustainability of future computing infrastructures to provide (i) an energy-efficient and economically viable deployment, (ii) a fault-tolerant automated operation, and (iii) a collaborative resource management to improve resource efficiency. We identify the main limitations of applying Cloud-based approaches close to the data sources and present the research challenges to Edge sustainability arising from these constraints. We propose two-phase immersion cooling, formal modeling, machine learning, and energy-centric federated management as Edge-enabling technologies. We present our early results towards the sustainability of an Edge infrastructure to demonstrate the benefits of our approach for future computing environments and deployments.Comment: 26 pages, 16 figure