In the past, utilities had usually just targeted the center of the range for safety, but they have now realized that by reducing the provided voltage to the bottom of the regulated range they can save huge amounts of energy, avoiding the need to construct additional power plants! However, to skirt the edge of the regulated range, utilities need to actually measure the voltage they are providing so they can avoid fines for being outside the range. Utilities are typically required to provide electrical power within certain bounds of voltage and frequency. Voltage Sensors for Smart GridsĬhris Yakymyshyn from FieldMetrics presented on his work on Sensors for Smart Grids, which focused on the complexities of designing voltage and current sensors for the medium-voltage environment that are highly accurate. In the future they foresee servers in the data center communicating data about their loads (and predicted loads) to the HVAC system to further reduce energy use by preventing overcooling. Interesting work, and they are seeing about 5-10% reductions in energy use with small increases in latency. Each type of job (identified by the executable image) is classified, and jobs are scheduled by the kernel on the properly tuned CPU. The other CPUs are kept at the highest performance level for the CPU-bound jobs. The basic idea is that some jobs are CPU-bound and others are I/O bound, so on a server with multiple CPUs, some CPUs can downshifted in voltage and frequency for I/O bound tasks (which spend most of their time waiting for I/O requests) with a consequent savings in energy. 2.8% of electricity in the US is used by datacenters, and their research is on trying to find ways to reduce energy use in the datacenter environment. Kanad Ghose presented on Dynamic Classification of Repetitive Jobs In Linux For Energy-Aware Scheduling: A Feasibility Study. So nice to be at a conference with open access to the proceedings so I can link to them directly! Energy Aware Scheduling
Our three lessons about feedback visualizations is that they should be actionable, that domain knowledge must go hand in hand with energy feedback systems, and that this feedback must be “sticky” to lead to changes in behaviors and attitudes. While I was probably the only attendee focused on feedback visualizations and behavior, I got some interesting feedback from other energy attendees, such as finding additional ways to connect to undergraduates (e.g., beer :))īelow are my notes on some of the presentations I found noteworthy.
I was presenting our paper on lessons learned from designing energy feedback visualizations for the Kukui Cup. There were perhaps 30 attendees for the ENERGY subconference, so I got to know several of the presenters. Each day had one keynote and on panel discussion drawn from all the different conferences/tracks, making for an interesting, and eclectic experience. The conference was a part of InfoSys 2013, which consists of several smaller conference all bundled together. I just finished attending the ENERGY 2013 conference in Lisbon.