KORHAMMER LECTURE

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY, DEPARTMENT OF ELECTRICAL ENGINEERING

“The Art of Green Design: Doing Nothing Well”

Jan M. Rabaey, Donald O. Pederson Distinguished Professor, University of California, Berkeley

Monday, March 29, 2010, 4:30pm, Computer Science 104

Abstract: Reducing human appetite for energy and the corresponding carbon footprint is one of the dominant societal problems of today. Information technology (IT) very likely will play a major role in our quest to generate, distribute, store and consume energy more efficiently. Unfortunately the IT platform itself represents a major consumer of electrical power, and its energy footprint is very likely to continue to grow over the next decades.

The most obvious approach to address this challenge is to continue to improve the energy efficiency of our computation, communication or storage devices. Unfortunately, the opportunities of doing so (using technology scaling or innovative architectures) are getting increasingly limited. Instead, a lower-hanging fruit is to eliminate the massive amount of waste that is inherent to today’s IT systems. Systems tend to be designed and optimized for peak performance. In reality, most computation nodes, networks and storage devices typically operate at a fraction of the maximum load, and do this with surprisingly low energy efficiency. If we could design systems that do “nothing” well (as phrased by David Culler), major energy savings would be enabled. Accomplishing “energy-proportional” computing requires a full-fledged top-down and bottom-up approach to the design of IT systems. This talk discusses what this means for a couple of systems ranging from large scale data centers over communication networks to small-scale body-area networks for medical applications.