http://www.greenercomputing.com/blog/2008/12/30/top-ten-predictions-green-it-2009

Preston’s predictions summary:

1. The Economic Meltdown Sparks Green IT.
2. Obama Gives Green IT a Big Boost.
   
3. Green IT Pro Write their Own Tickets.
   
4. Power Shortages Force Virtualization and Data Center Consolidation.
   
5. CIOs Become CGOs (Chief Green Officers).
   
6. The Green Cloud Replaces Data Centers.
   
7. Companies Look Beyond the Data Center for Green IT.
   
8. Servers, Networking Gear, and other IT Equipment Get Green Ratings.
   
9. Best Green Data Center Practices Become Standardized.
   
10. Green Data Centers Go Modular.

June 19^th, 2009, Barcelona, Spain

In conjunction with the 6^th Intl. Conference on Autonomic Computing and Communications (ICAC 2009)

SCOPE:

Large server farms—from enterprise datacenters and giant-scale Internet services to utility and public cloud computing—are a critical part of the execution platform for many of today’s software programs. Interactive web services, business workflows, large-scale batch data processing, and many scientific computations all run on platforms built atop large server farms. While these systems differ in many ways, they share many common challenges, such as the desire to maximize efficiency and performance while maintaining predictable behavior, power efficiency and fairness, and at the same time responding appropriately to environmental and system changes such as hardware failures and changes in workload.

We believe that solutions to these challenges in performance, reliability and scalability will share many similarities across all variants of server farm infrastructures. In particular, we believe automated techniques will play a critical role in reasoning about and orchestrating the behaviors of these large scale systems. The goal of this workshop is to broadly explore the similarities and differences in current and future policies and techniques in the context of these large server farms.

Important Dates:

Submission deadline: February 27^th, 2009

Notification of acceptance: March 27^th, 2009

Camera-ready deadline: April 6^th, 2009

Workshop Organizers:

Program Co-chairs

Jeff Chase, Duke University

Emre Kiciman, Microsoft Research

Rich Wolski, UC Santa Barbara

Program Committee

Katerina Argyraki, EPFL

Franck Capello, INRIA

Renato J. Figueiredo, University of Florida

Marty Humphrey, University of Virginia

Randy Katz, UC Berkeley

Mike Kozuch, Intel Labs Pittsburgh

Milan Milenkovic, Intel

Partha Ranganathan, HP Labs

Douglas Thain, University of Notre Dame

John Wilkes, Google

Topics and Submissions:

We invite authors to submit short position papers or reports of early work related to the automated control of datacenters and clouds. Relevant topics for submission include, but are not limited to:

· Autonomic policies and techniques for improving reliability, performance, scalability and power efficiency of large server farms

· Separation of application concerns from infrastructure, resource, power and other management issues

· Change management and adaptation techniques

· Experience reports on challenges and solutions in large-scale internet services, cloud computing infrastructures, enterprise datacenters and other server farms.

· Experience reports on requirements of high performance data computing, scientific computing, data processing and other applications using large server farms

· Experiences with automatic control strategies, including strategies based on rule systems, strategies economic models, metering-based, control

· Reports on key similarities and difference in autonomic requirements across classes of server farm infrastructures

· Management of network infrastructures within server farms and between server farms

http://www.grid-appliance.org/wiki/index.php/VTDC09

Important dates

• Submission deadline: February 20th, 2009
• Notification of acceptance: March 23rd, 2009
• Final manuscripts due: April 6, 2009
• Workshop: June 15, 2009

Workshop scope

The convergence of virtualization technologies and distributed computing is an exciting development and the subject of much research in both academia and industry, where interest in Cloud Computing environments as a means of provisioning Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) has grown considerably in the recent past. The VTDC workshop is intended to be a forum for the exchange of ideas and experiences on the use of virtualization technologies in distributed computing, the challenges and opportunities offered by the development of virtual systems themselves, as well as case studies of application of virtualization. The scope of “virtualization technologies” includes techniques and concepts to enable virtual machines, virtual networks, virtual data, virtual storage, virtual applications and virtual instruments. The scope of “distributed computing” includes Grid-computing, cluster computing, peer-to-peer computing and mobile computing.

The VTDC workshop brings together researchers in academia and industry who are involved in research, development and planning activities involving the use of virtualization in the context of distributed systems – such as computing clouds and Grids - where the opportunities and challenges with respect to the management of such virtualized systems is of interest to the ICAC community at large.

Topics

VTDC 2009 topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

• Infrastructure as a service (IaaS)
• Virtualization in data centers and cloud computing infrastructures
• Using virtualization technologies for resource management and QoS assurance
• Security aspects of using virtualization in a distributed environment
• Virtual networks
• Virtual data and storage systems
• Fault tolerance in virtualized environments
• Virtualization in P2P systems
• Virtualization-based adaptive/autonomic systems
• Virtual environment factories and services
• Environment configuration
• Virtual machine management
• Modeling (applications and systems)
• Case studies of applications using virtual technologies
• Deployment studies of virtualization technologies
• Tools relevant to virtualization

Organizers

• General Chair: Kate Keahey, University of Chicago, Argonne National Laboratory
• Program Chair: Renato Figueiredo, University of Florida
• Steering Committee Chair: Jose A. B. Fortes, University of Florida
• Program Committee: TBD

http://icac2009.acis.ufl.edu/

IMPORTANT DATES

Full paper:  11:59 EST, Jan 19, 2009
Workshop proposals: Sep 25, 2008
Demo/Exhibit proposals: Mar 20, 2009

SCOPE

To deal with the increasing complexity of large-scale computing systems, computers and applications must learn to manage themselves in accordance with high-level guidance from humans – a vision that has been referred to as autonomic computing. Meeting the grand challenges of autonomic computing requires scientific and technological advances in a wide variety of fields, as well as new software and system architectures that support the effective integration of the constituent technologies.
The purpose of the 6th International Conference on Autonomic Computing and Communications (ICAC-09) is to bring together researchers and practitioners addressing aspects of self-management in computing systems. In doing so, we hope to develop and nurture a community that can work together to realize the vision of large-scale self-managing systems. The conference builds on previous highly influential meetings in New York, Seattle, Dublin, Jacksonville, and Chicago.
Papers are solicited on a broad array of topics of relevance to autonomic computing, particularly those that bear on connections and relationships among different areas of research or report on prototype systems or experiences. Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:
* Autonomic computing systems or prototype systems that exhibit self-monitoring, self-configuration, self-optimization, self-healing, and/or self-protection.
* Fundamental science of self-managing systems: understanding, controlling, or exploiting emergent behavior, fault-tolerance, machine learning, control theory, predictive methods and their use to automate manual operations and enforce behavior.
* Software engineering principles and architectures for self-managing systems, based on interoperable Grid Services, agent-based systems, Web Services, model-based systems or novel paradigms such as biological, economic or social.
* System-level technologies, middleware or services that entail interactions among two or more components of self-managing systems in standalone, distributed, cluster, and Grid computing environments (e.g., health monitoring, dependency analysis, problem localization or remediation, workload management, and provisioning).
* Toolkits, environments, models, languages, runtime and compiler technologies for building self-managing components, systems or applications.
* Specific self-managing components, such as server, storage, network, data center or specific application elements. Emphasis should be placed on techniques or lessons that may generalize to other components.
* Management topics, such as specification and modeling of service-level agreements, negotiation/conversation support, behavior enforcement, etc., tie in with IT governance, and interaction with legacy systems.
* Interfaces to autonomic systems, including user interfaces, interfaces for monitoring and controlling behavior, techniques for defining, distributing, and understanding policies.
* Experiences with autonomic system or component prototypes: measurements, evaluations, or analyses of system behavior, user studies, experiences with large-scale deployments of self-managing systems or applications.
* Applications of autonomics to real and complex problems in science, engineering, business and society.

ORGANIZATION

GENERAL CO-CHAIRS:
Simon Dobson, UCD Dublin, IE
John Strassner, Waterford Inst. of Tech., IE

STEERING COMMITTE:
Simon Dobson, UCD Dublin, IE
José Fortes, Univ. of Florida, US
Kumar Goswami, HP, USA
Salim Hariri, Univ. of Arizona, US
Jeffrey Kephart, IBM, USA
Manish Parashar, Rutgers Univ., US
Brent Miller, IBM, US
Karsten Schwan, Georgia Tech, US
John Strassner, Waterford Inst. of Tech., IE
John Wilkes, Google, US
Mazin Yousif, Avirtec, US

PROGRAM CO-CHAIRS:
Manish Parashar, Rutgers Univ., USA
Onn Shehory, IBM Research Haifa, IL

PROGRAM COMMITTEE:
Tarek Abdelzaher, Univ. of Illinois U-C, US
Richard Anthony, Univ. of Greenwich, UK
Ozalp Babaoglu, Univ. of Bologna, IT
Liz Bacon, Univ. of Greenwich, UK
Rosa Badia, UPC, ES
Claudio Bartolini, HP Labs, US
Ricardo Biancini, Rutgers Univ., US
Frances Brazier, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, NL
David Breitgand, Univ. of Haifa, IL
Marcus Brunner, NEC, DE
Mark Burgess, University College Oslo, NO
Fabián Bustamante, Northwestern Univ., US
Hakima Chaouchi, IT Sud Paris, FR
Luca Console, Universita’ di Torino, IT
Alva Couch, Tufts Univ., US
Michael Covington, Intel, US
Spyros Denazis, U. Patras, GR
Yixin Diao, IBM Corp., US
Peter Dinda, Northwestern Univ., US
Renato Figueiredo, Univ. of Florida, US
Alex Galis, UCL, UK
Holger Giese, HPI/Univ. of Potsdam, DE
Nathan Gnanasambandam, Xerox, US
Richard Golding, IBM Corp., US
Mike Hinchey, Lero, IE
Brendan Jennings, TSSG/WIT, IE
Guofei Jiang, NEC, US
Gail Kaiser, Columbia Univ., US
Carlos A. Kamienski, UFABC, BR
Nagarajan Kandasamy, Drexel Univ., US
Emre Kiciman, Microsoft Research, US
Zhiling Lan, Illinois Inst. of Tech., US
Rogerio de Lemos, Univ. of Kent, UK
Dave Lewis, Trinity College Dublin, IE
Leonardo Mariani, Univ. of Milano Bicocca, IT
Ignacio Martin Llorente, Universidad Complutense de Madrid, ES
Julie McCann, Imperial College, UK
Phillip K. McKinley, Michigan State Univ., US
Nenad Medvidović, Univ. of Southern California, US
Hausi A. Müller, Univ. of Victoria, CA
Jorg Muller, TU Clausthal, DE
Julian Padget, Univ. of Bath, UK
Van Parunak, NewVectors, US
Marcelo Perazolo, IBM Corporation, US
Mauro Pezzè, Univ. of Milano Bicocca, IT
Mohammed A. Razzaque, UCD Dublin, IE
Jacques Sauve, U. F. Campina Grande, BR
Daniel Scheibli, SAP Corp., US
Richard Schlichting, AT&T, US
Giovanna di Marzo Serugendo, Univ. of London, UK
Mikhail Smirnov, Fraunhofer FOKUS, DE
Jordi Torres, UPC, ES
Roy Sterritt, Univ. Of Ulster, UK
Davide Tosi, University of Milan, IT
Giuseppe (Peppo) Valetto, Drexel Univ., US
Sven van den Meer, Waterford IT, IE
Aad van Moorsel, Newcastle Univ., UK
George Vouros, Univ. of the Aegean, GR
Dongyan Xu, Purdue Univ., US
Franco Zambonelli, Universita di Modena e Reggio Emilia, IT
Xiaoyun Zhu, VMware, US

DEMO/EXHIBIT CO-CHAIRS:
Simon Dobson, UCD Dublin, IE
John Strassner, Motorola Labs, US

WORKSHOP CHAIR:
Omer Rana, Cardiff Univ., UK

PUBLICITY CO-CHAIRS:
Masoud Sadjadi, Florida International Univ., US
James Won-Ki Hong, POSTECH, South Korea
Dave Lewis, Trinity, IE

LOCAL ARRANGEMENTS CHAIR:
Joan Serrat, UPC, Barcelona, ES

FINANCE/INDUSTRY CO-CHAIRS:
Brent Miller, IBM Corporation, US
Michael Nunez, Sun Microsystems, US
Jose A. Lozano, Telefónica, ES

HOT TOPICS CHAIR:
Fabián E. Bustamante

DOCTORAL SYMPOSIUM CO-CHAIRS:
Jian Zhang, Microsoft, US
Andres Quiroz Hernandes, Rutgers Univ., US

CYBER CHAIR:
Ming Zhao, Florida International Univ, US

IMPORTANT DATES
Full paper: 23 February 2009
Author notification: 23 March 2009
Final manuscripts: 6 April 2009

SCOPE
Scientific communities worldwide have constructed massive grids that contain several tens of thousands of CPU’s and several PetaBytes of storage. The complexity of grids has increased due to the large range of dynamic resources involved: hardware and middleware, but also software usage rights, sensors, etc.  Grid applications taking advantage of those resources have also increased in complexity.  In addition, grid usage is based on a sharing paradigm, which introduces the collective behaviour of users as a new complicating factor. A major technical and societal challenge for the immediate future is the stabilisation of production grids.  The control and maintenance of these complex systems to achieve that remain a significant operational issue. Application optimization is similarly challenging.
Autonomic Computing has emerged as a specific scientific domain, with the strong involvement of industry. Autonomic computing is highly relevant to grid systems at a time when production grids have become critical scientific infrastructures and must move to sustainable models. Considering the volume and structure of the manpower dedicated to the day-to-day operations, Self-Optimization, Self-Healing and Self-Configuration could provide immediate benefits.
At the core of the autonomic computing is the fact that high-level goals should be exposed by the middleware and should be easily tuned by users and system administrators. The Workshop will contribute to building bridges between grid researchers on one hand and those in the autonomic computing community on the other. The focus of the workshop is to identify key scientific challenges related to the management and evolution of grids as a specific category of complex large-scale systems. The goal of the workshop is to promote community wide discussion of, and collaboration on potentially high-impact ideas that will influence and foster continued research in improving the manageability and reliability of grids.
The workshop will feature invited presentations from major grid projects and Autonomic Computing scientists as well as regular papers and posters. The format will leave ample time for discussion

PAPER/POSTER SUBMISSION AND PUBLICATION
Full papers (a maximum of 8 pages in length) and posters (2 pages) are invited. All manuscripts will be reviewed and judged on merits including correctness, originality, quality of presentation, and relevance to the workshop themes. Please see the conference web site for more information on the submission process. It is expected that the proceedings will be published by ACM.

ORGANISATION
Chair
Cécile Germain-Renaud LRI, France

Program Committee
Mark Burgess Oslo U.,    Norway
Ricard Gavalda UPC, Spain
Charles Loomis LAL, France
Manish Parashar  Rutgers U.., USA
Ron Perrot Queen’s U. Belfast
Omer Rana, Cardiff Univ., UK
Lorenza Saitta UPO, Italy
Jordi Torres UPC, Spain
Ramin Yahyapour Dortmund U., Deutschland

- Executive summary: problem addressed, solution proposed, results. Reading this it should be clear what problem is being solved (and not how it is, or how good the solution is, or your opinion of it).

- Description: how serious is the problem? this may not be needed for generic problems. But for some cases, it may not be obvious.  Have others solved this problem, tried to, and how far they got?. Solution approach (the main idea).

-Results: focus on quantification if possible to describe the results achieved. Are there any important conclusions that can be drawn  based directly from the results? What is the significance of the results, implications?

-Your critique/Conclusion: In some cases, it may mean comparing results with some other work/approaches for a similar problem, identifying commonality, differences. Is this paper supporting or contradicting a known result? Does it speak to conventional wisdom in the domain?

OFFICIAL COURSE DESCRIPTION : Guia docente” (Spanish)

OBJETIVOS:

El objetivo del curso es ofrecer una visión de los desarrollos y la investigación en los entornos de ejecución para sistemas paralelos y distribuidos. En el curso se hará especial énfasis en los entornos requeridos en las nuevas aplicaciones ebusiness y grid. Se estudiará la organización interna y la gestión que recursos requerida para garantizar funcionalidades y calidad de servicio.

CONTENIDOS: Distributed object technologies and protocols, Internal organization of middleware, Grid middleware, Middleware for eBusiness applications, Middleware Performance and Analysis, New Middleware Challenges: Autonomic Computing

METODOLOGÍA: Esta asignatura es avanzada y los conceptos básicos se suponen ya conocidos en asignaturas anteriores y está enfocada principalmente a introducir al estudiante en los conceptos más avanzados.

Con clases magistrales se introduciran los temas que se trabajarán sobre artículos recientes publicados en congresos o revistas especializadas y propuestas de proyectos en desarrollo. Los alumnos deberán realizar la lectura y discusión de estos artículos.
Los alumos realizaran un trabajo personal y presentaran un tema de investigación relacionado con la asignatura. El estudiante tendrá que desarrollar su capacidad crítica para evaluar la adecuación de las soluciones presentadas o, en su caso, proponer posibles ideas.

De las 150 horas de trabajo, la distribución será:

· 60 horas (4 horas semana, 15 semanas) de clase presencial. Estas 60 horas se distribuirán en clase magistrales, trabajos, casos de estudio y debate de artículos de investigación y presentación de trabajos
· 90 horas de trabajo no presencial: lectura de artículos de investigación, realización de trabajos, preparación de las presentaciones y estudio.

EVALUACIÓN:

La evaluación se basará en

(a) la participación en las discusiones,
(b) entrega de los trabajos propuestos y
(c) en un trabajo final individual o por grupos

INSTRUCTOR

Jordi Torres
Phone: +34 93 401 7223
Email : torres@ac.upc.edu
Office : Campus Nord, Modul C6. Room 217.
Lecture and meeting times: to be announced
Classroom: to be announced
Office hours: By appointment.

COURSE CONTENT:

Nowadays, business and scientific organisations have a large amount of critical workflow processes that depend upon a set of heterogeneous applications. This set of applications can range from transactional applications, with databases, to non interactive applications such as those that perform scientific CPU-intensive computing, document indexing or intensive I/O. To efficiently execute all these kinds of applications, a new execution environment (or middleware) is needed to manage the available resources and simplify the development and integration of the different types of applications and services. These middleware components are crucial to new systems and architectures because of their direct impact on the quality of the service offered by the application.

This course provides an overview of the wide scope of this area and introduces past and current research focusing on conceptual and practical aspects of  Distributed object technologies and protocols, Internal organization of middleware, Grid middleware, Middleware for eBusiness applications, Middleware Performance and Analysis,  and the new Middleware Challenges as Autonomic Computing.

The course also has the objective of introducing the student to research. For this reason each year we focus the course on some of the dichotomies which come to mind when looking at the strategies available to deal with concrete problems in the wider EEDC space and in relation to some problem of the utmost relevance. This year’s special focus is on the green computing.

Based on the previous concepts there will be paper readings assigned for some of the classes. This is an important part of the course and it is required that each student read these before coming to class. We will have two main reading parts in the course, one for general papers and one for more in depth research in the area (related with the research project). Discussions will be led by one or more students and may include a brief presentation of the paper.

All students taking the course are required to complete a research project (or “state-of-the-field” review). The project is intended to provide the student with an opportunity to gain experience with research in a topic related to the content of the course. Moreover we will introduce the student to the research information resources.

Finally we will learn how a research conference is organized. The students will be involved in the organization committees of the Third Workshop on Execution Environments for Distributed Computing (EEDC 2009). All the research projects will be presented at this conference after a standard review process. Finally all the projects will be published as a book chapter in a book published by UPC.

GRADING POLICY:

Paper Readings/Presentations: 35%

• Basic papers: 15%
• Research papers: 20%

Research Project: 35%

• Research survey content and writing 25%
• Presentation of the workshop paper 10%

Participation: 30%

• Conference organization and book edition participation 10%
• Class Participation in paper discussions 10%
• Homework 10%

TENTATIVE SCHEDULE:

To be announced

Basic papers: Reading/Presentation/Class discussion

It is required that each student read the papers assigned in class. You will also have to submit (by midnight the deadline day) a report/presentation about the readings with the main contributions of the papers. Additionally each paper will be presented at the class (with ppt or equivalent) by one group and discussed by the students (the choice will be random). Some suggestions to the content of your class presentation and discussionideas for the presentation of the basic papers will be explained in class.

List of papers: To be announced

Key dates: To be announced

How to read a paper?

S.Keshav. ACM SIGCOMM Computer Communication Review 83 Volume 37, Number 3, July 2007. http://www.sigcomm.org/ccr/drupal/files/p83-keshavA.pdf

Research Paper: Reading/Presentation/Class discussion:

Soon more information.

List of papers: To Be announced . Some suggestions to the content of your class presentation and discussionideas for the presentation could be found here.

Key dates: To Be announced

EEDC’09 Workshop:

Third Workshop on Execution Environments for Distributed Computing (EEDC 2009), june 2009.

Soon more information.

Book:

Soon more information.

Previous edition EEDC’08:

“CLOUD COMPUTING: Execution Environments for Distributed Computation Issues”. J. Torres, I. Goiri and M. Macias Editors. Lulu.com publisher, 2008. ISBN: 978-1-4092-1787-9. http://www.lulu.com/content/3077784

Let me explain this idea by one simple example. Assume that we have 100 megawatts coming into a facility, and 50 of them are taken up by the IT load. Assume that the consolidation estrategy reduce the IT load and assume that now the IT load is only 40 megawatts even though the facility load is still 100 megawatts. We would see that the IT load had decreased, and so we would adjust our facility load accordingly. So we adjust, reducing our facility load by one megawatt to match with the IT load reduction. So now our facility load is 90 megawatts while our IT load is 40 megawatts. The PUE is now 2.25, which is worse than the PUE of 2 we had before our virtualized/consolidated strategy. In fact, the more energy we save with virtualization/consolidation strategy, the worse it could be for the PUE metric.

Even though if we consolidate servers, we will have fewer servers to cool. That presumably means that it will be able to reduce my facility load further because we might be able to shutdown part of the cooling units for instance.  I don’t think that the reduction in heat output will be enough to offset the IT load reduction to have an overall lower PUE.

In the end, what is most important is reducing the overall power load, instead of an improved PUE number. Do we need another metric?

Some preliminary work [1]  indicates that many datacenters using the most efficient equipment and best practices  may have a PUE of 3.0 or greater, but with proper design a PUE value of 1.6 should be achievable. This means that for every 1.6 watts in at the utility meter, only one watt is delivered out to the IT load. Currently, there are no comprehensive data which show the true spread of the PUE for datacenters even though Google which shows that the company runs some of the most efficient data centers in the industry acording [2] with an average PUE of 1.21. Also microsoft goals is to have a PUE of 1.12 in three years [3].

More detailed information can be found in [1], a document from the Green Grid, an association of IT professionals seeking to dramatically raise the energy efficiency of datacenters through a series of short-term and longterm proposals.

[1] “Green Grid Metrics: Describing Datacenter Power Efficiency”,
http://www.thegreengrid.org/gg_content/Green_Grid_Metrics_WP.pdf

[2]  “Saving electricity one data center at a time”
http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/10/saving-electricity-one-data-center-at.html

[3] “Our Vision for Generation 4 Modular Data Centers - One way of Getting it just right…“ http://loosebolts.wordpress.com/2008/12/02/our-vision-for-generation-4-modular-data-centers-one-way-of-getting-it-just-right/