[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]

T O D A Y . . .
   				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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For more information, please visit

		   http://math.mit.edu/crib

Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Cambridge, MA  02139
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