School of Computing Research Colloquia

Energy Efficiency In Cloud Computing - The ASCETiC Approach

Django Armstrong, Distributed Systems and Services Research Theme

Abstract: Energy efficiency is at the heart of the EU’s Europe 2020 Strategy for smart, sustainable and inclusive growth as part of a transition to a resource efficient economy. Current trends in industry show continuous growth in the adoption and market value of Cloud computing with many companies changing their business models and products to adapt to a service orientated outlook (e.g. Microsoft's planned Windows 10 give-away, Office 365). With this growth, predictions have been made on an unsustainable quadrupling in the energy consumption and carbon emissions of data centres used to operate Cloud services by 2020 with comparable emissions to the aeronautical industry.

The Adapting Service lifeCycle towards EfficienT Clouds (ASCETiC) FP7 EU project is focused on providing novel methods and tools to support software developers aiming to optimise energy efficiency and minimise the carbon footprint resulting from designing, developing, deploying, and running software in Clouds.

This talk will cover: 1) The ASCETiC energy efficient Cloud computing reference architecture in the context of energy awareness and self-adaptation; 2) Present a live software demonstration of the first prototype of the architecture on a Cloud testbed; 3) Discuss our initial scientific findings on the performance of the prototype, and 4) Discuss lessons learned on leading development of a large EU STReP project.

The talk will be concluded with ideas on the future direction of and challenges within the research area of green Cloud computing.