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Professor Ishfaq Ahmad received two NSF grants for his collaborative research projects in "Green Computing".

Oct. 28, 2009

Two multi-university research projects are underway to develop ways to reduce the power consumption of computers, printers and display screens. Developing means to manage energy consumption in computers is imperative from both environmental and economical perspectives. The Environmental Protection Agency estimated that there were more than 180 million computers in use in the United States in 2007.

University of Texas at Arlington Computer Science and Engineering Professor Ishfaq Ahmad is involved in a new area known as "Green Computing" the environmentally-responsible design and application of computers and related resources, including energy-efficient processors and peripherals as well as reduced system-wide energy consumption through software and hardware means.High-performance computing systems consume substantial amounts of energy, so much so that their energy requirements for powering and cooling are becoming comparable to their purchase price. The cumulative energy consumption due to computing is close to 2% of the entire energy consumption in the US. There is a lack of generally applicable methods for reducing energy consumption while ensuring good quality of service.

Professor Ahmad has formed a team with computer scientists from the University of Tennessee at Knoxville, the University of Florida, and the Virginia Institute of Technology to pursue several research projects in Green Computing. The collaborative effort has secured several research grants from the National Science Foundation (NSF#0905196, NSF#0903456) and the Semiconductor Research Corporation worth nearly $2 million, with UT Arlington receiving close to $550,000.

In one project, Dr. Ahmad and his associates will develop GridPac (Grid with Power-Aware Computing), an automated software tool that will allow grid managers and service providers to schedule multiple workflows across a large-scale system. In another project, researchers will collaborate to design innovative algorithms and tools specifically for applications at the processor level, focusing on multicore procssors. A new theoretical and experimental framework called multi-element and multi-objective optimization will be used to develop CorePac, a software toolkit to minimize energy consumption and maximize performance while considering constraints of current and emerging multi-core processors. CorePac will be the basis for the subsequent development of production-quality software for energy/performance tradeoffs.

An offshoot of these projects will initiate new graduate level courses on related topics and develop relevant tutorials that will help to create awareness and educate a large audience on a critically important research topic.