The rapid advance of computing technology has created a world powered
by millions of computers. Often these computers are idly consuming energy
unnecessarily in spite of all the efforts of hardware manufacturers. This thesis
examines proposals to determine when to power down computers without
negatively impacting on the service they are used to deliver, compares and
contrasts the efficiency of virtualisation with containerisation, and investigates
the energy efficiency of the popular cryptocurrency Bitcoin.
We begin by examining the current corpus of literature and defining the key
terms we need to proceed.
Then we propose a technique for improving the energy consumption of servers
by moving them into a sleep state and employing a low powered device to act
as a proxy in its place.
After this we move on to investigate the energy efficiency of virtualisation and
compare the energy efficiency of two of the most common means used to do
this.
Moving on from this we look at the cryptocurrency Bitcoin. We consider the
energy consumption of bitcoin mining and if this compared with the value of
bitcoin makes this profitable.
Finally we conclude by summarising the results and findings of this thesis.
This work increases our understanding of some of the challenges of energy
efficient computation as well as proposing novel mechanisms to save energy