Green Computing

Catalog description

Note: Previously offered as 08-340. Energy is a key societal resource. However, our energy usage is rising at an alarming rate and therefore it has become critical to manage its consumption more efficiently for long term sustainability. This course introduces students to the exciting area of "Green Computing", and is organizationally divided into two tracks. The first track is "Energy-Efficient Computing", which considers the state of the art techniques for improving the energy efficiency of mobile devices, to laptop and desktop class computers and finally to data centers. We will cover energy efficiency across the hardware/software stack, starting from the individual components like processors and radio interfaces to system level architectures and optimizations. The second track is "Applying Computing towards Sustainability", covering topics that leverage computing to reduce the energy footprint of our society. In particular, we will focus on Smart Buildings and the Smart Grid, covering topics such as sensing, modeling and controlling the energy usage of buildings, new operating systems or software stacks for the smart infrastructure, as well as the privacy and security issues with the new "internet of things". The goal of this course is to help students acquire some of the knowledge and the skills needed to do research in this space of "Green Computing". Although the course is listed within SCS, it should be of interest to students in several departments, including ECE, MechE, CEE, EPP and Architecture.