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Department of Computer Science and Technology

Date: 
Friday, 1 November, 2024 - 13:00 to 14:00
Speaker: 
Prashant Shenoy, University of Massachusetts
Venue: 
FW11, William Gates Building. Zoom link: https://cl-cam-ac-uk.zoom.us/j/4361570789?pwd=Nkl2T3ZLaTZwRm05bzRTOUUxY3Q4QT09&from=addon

*Abstract*

The exponential growth of cloud computing has been a defining trend of our time, fueled by rapidly growing demands from data-intensive and machine learning workloads. Despite the end of Dennard scaling, the cloud's energy demand grew more slowly than expected over the past decade due to the aggressive implementation of energy-efficiency optimizations. Unfortunately, there are few significant remaining optimization opportunities using traditional methods, and moving forward, the cloud's continued exponential growth will translate into rising energy demand, which, if left unchecked, will translate to increasing carbon emissions.

In this talk, I will argue for a CarbonFirst approach to designing cloud computing systems by making carbon efficiency a first-class design metric, similar to traditional metrics of performance and reliability. I will explain how today's systems can be made first carbon-aware by exposing energy and carbon usage information to software platforms and then made carbon-efficient by providing control over the system's carbon usage. I will present an initial design of a system to enable such carbon awareness and management and present several application case studies on how modern cloud applications can employ these mechanisms to reduce their carbon footprint. I will end with open research challenges in the emerging field of computational decarbonization.

*Bio*

Prashant Shenoy is currently a Distinguished Professor and Associate Dean in the College of Information and Computer Sciences at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. He received the B.Tech degree in Computer Science and Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay and the M.S and Ph.D degrees in Computer Science from the University of Texas, Austin. His research interests lie in distributed systems and networking, with a recent emphasis on cloud and sustainable computing. He has been the recipient of several best paper awards at leading conferences, including a Sigmetrics Test of Time Award. He is a fellow of the ACM, the IEEE, and the AAAS.

Seminar series: 
Energy and Environment Group

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