[Crib-list] SPEAKER: Larry Smarr (UCSD) -- Computational Research in Boston Seminar -- Wednesday, April 15, 2009 at 1:00 PM in Room 32-123.

[Shirley Entzminger]

				Special
		COMPUTATIONAL RESEARCH in BOSTON SEMINAR

NOTE:  different day, time and room...

DATE:		Wednesday, April 15, 2009
TIME:		1:00 PM
LOCATION:	Building 32, Room 123 (Stata Center)

Pizza and beverages will be provided at 12:45 PM outside Room 32-123.
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TITLE:		Can A Greener Internet Help Us Moderate Climate Change?


SPEAKER:	Larry Smarr
		University of California, San Diego


ABSTRACT:

This year marks a turning point in the debate on global climate change. 
The focus of the discussion is rapidly moving from a scientific analysis 
of how human activity effects climate change to a political process on how 
best to regulate greenhouse gas emissions. The Climate Group's Smart 2020 
study reveals that the global Information and Communication Technology 
(ICT) industry produces greenhouse gases equivalent to that produced by 
the aviation industry (~2-3 percent). Furthermore, the ICT sector's 
emissions will nearly triple, in a business-as-usual scenario, from 2002 
to 2020. On the other hand, the Climate Group estimates that 
transformative applications of ICT to electricity grids, logistic chains, 
intelligent transportation and building infrastructure, and other social 
systems can reduce global greenhouse gas emissions by about 15 percent-- 
five times ICT's own footprint! I will discuss initiatives on university 
campuses in the US and Australia to innovate new solutions to these 
challenges. I will describe in detail the NSF-funded GreenLight Project at 
UCSD which instruments an 8-rack modular data center, allowing end users 
to discover the energy cost of computational solving an application using 
different algorithms and/or different computing architectures.

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Larry Smarr is the founding director of the California Institute for 
Telecommunications and Information Technology and Harry E. Gruber
Professor in the Jacobs School's Department of Computer Science and 
Engineering at UCSD.

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Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Cambridge, MA  02139