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The Green Room, an innovative server room in ��ݮ��Ƶ’s new Mathematics 4 building, will apply an efficiency lens to computing research and education 

When we picture the drivers of climate change, it’s often smokestacks, sprawling factories and transport trucks. But there’s a quieter, less visible contributor we rarely consider—our daily digital activity.

From streaming movies to powering artificial intelligence, computing now consumes an enormous amount of energy, which is estimated to be up to 5 percent of the world’s total daily electricity—and that number is only expected to grow.

“We're burning up the planet, and it turns out that computing is part of the problem,” says Dr. Martin Karsten, Professor and Associate Director of the Cheriton School of Computer Science. “As computer scientists, we need to address that. We all have a part to play in building a greener future.”

Computing hits a resource wall

This energy crisis is exacerbated by current trends in computer hardware.

For decades, computing power grew exponentially without a corresponding increase in energy consumption. This was largely due to innovations in chip manufacturing that enabled increasingly more transistors to be packed onto a single chip. Moore’s Law is the observation that the number of transistors in an integrated circuit (IC) doubles approximately every two years on account of this miniaturization. Yet, we are now reaching the physical limits of how small transistors can be made and Moore’s Law is expected to end.

“For many years, computer scientists weren’t concerned with efficiency because computing capacity grew at a largely constant energy envelope,” says Karsten. “It's very likely that this nice freebie of more computing capacity at the same energy cost will end in the near future. Then, if we want to increase our computing usage, we will have to even further increase energy consumption.”

��ݮ��Ƶ’s Green Room: a flagship facility to advance sustainable computing

In the face of this resource-constrained future, Karsten believes that computer scientists must embrace a paradigm shift and adopt an efficiency lens when designing computing applications and systems. His own research expertise lies in this area. Recently, he published research showing that, by adding just 30 lines of code to the Linux operating system, the energy efficiency of data centers can be improved by as much as 30%.

Karsten is also overseeing the creation of a unique computing facility in the Faculty’s new Mathematics 4 building that will accelerate research in this area. The Green Room will be an energy-efficient server room that will enable researchers and students to study large-scale computations and improve resource efficiency.

“This will not be your run-of-the-mill data center,” explains Karsten. “It'll be a setup where we have extremely good insight into the entire technology stack. We’ll be able to measure power consumption and then correlate power consumption and cooling overhead with the computation that's currently going on.”

Several features distinguish the new facility. The technology stack will be entirely reconfigurable, allowing researchers to experiment with different combinations of hardware and software. Special sensors and monitoring tools will be integrated into the facility's infrastructure and computing equipment, enabling researchers to collect data on and analyze how resources are being used across the system. The infrastructure will also integrate different cooling technologies and power supplies and will use innovative methods to capture and use residual heat.

Lastly, the facility will be extensible, allowing new computing hardware to be added to it throughout its lifetime. Thus, it will support transformative research well beyond a single technology. 

Karsten says that no other facility of its kind exists in Canada, adding, “This is an area where we can really shine.”

Transforming computing education and research

So much more than the sum of its technology, the innovative facility will be the impetus for a renewed emphasis on efficiency in computing education and research.

“As recently as the 1990s, any self-respecting programmer would be very concerned about resources and keeping their programs small, neat and tidy,” says Karsten. “That's not the case anymore. In the last 30 years, programmer efficiency has become more important than program efficiency.”

Computing power grew exponentially during this period, yet there was a shortage of skilled programmers. A plethora of tools were created to boost programmer productivity, often at the expense of efficient code.

“You always optimize for a critical resource,” says Karsten. “If your critical resource is the human being in the loop, you make things as easy as possible for the human being. But in ten or twenty years, the critical resource will again become the machine.”

The new facility will help prepare the next generation of computing leaders. It will create opportunities for students to participate in cutting-edge research. At the same time, new courses could be developed to build students’ expertise in resource-conscious computing. Given ��ݮ��Ƶ’s exceptional entrepreneurship ecosystem, it is also likely that the facility could lead to spinoff companies that leverage breakthroughs in sustainable computing. These ventures would contribute to the vibrant local tech innovation sector in ��ݮ��Ƶ and beyond.

Interdisciplinary research to improve climate science, disease diagnosis and security and privacy

Karsten emphasizes the importance of collaboration to the success of this exciting project. To this end, he has assembled a diverse and interdisciplinary research team to address efficiency concerns across five research themes: “Measurement and Monitoring, Runtime Systems”,  “Scientific Computing”, “Big Data and Artificial Intelligence” and “Biology and Health.” The team’s wide-ranging work will have applications in climate modelling, cancer diagnosis, biodiversity studies, graphics rendering and much more.

The facility will make it possible to run large-scale applications in these subject areas while performing low-level measurements of resource utilization and energy consumption. Each domain of computing grapples with resource consumption in ways that are specific to its applications, algorithms, data characteristics and infrastructure needs, so it is important to tailor efficiency solutions to the application. Even being able to accurately quantify energy use is helpful.

“It's already useful to know the energy consumption of a particular application,” says Karsten. “It enables us to make decisions in a resource-constrained future. For instance, do we run the weather forecast for tomorrow, or do we run a couple of cryptocurrency computations? Because we know how much energy each will consume and what they will cost, we can evaluate.”

Building on Tradition

Karsten believes ��ݮ��Ƶ is the ideal place for a forward-looking computing facility like the Green Room.

“UW has always been extremely pragmatic in our approach to computing,” says Karsten. “In the 60s, 70s and 80s, well-known pioneers at UW built useful software for the rest of the world.” 

These early visionaries recognized the revolutionary potential of computers and made bold investments in computing research and education. In 1967, the Math and Computing building opened, featuring the now legendary Red Room—a cutting-edge computer facility of its time.

The Red Room empowered generations of students and researchers who drove innovation at the forefront of computing. From the WATFOR team that developed influential compilers for early IBM mainframes to breakthroughs that advanced personal computing, smartphones, internet search engines and the cryptographic standards that safeguard our data, ��ݮ��Ƶ has played a key role in shaping the digital world.

Karsten believes that the Green Room–the name of which is an ode to earlier computing facility–will build on this legacy and keep ��ݮ��Ƶ at the vanguard of computing.

“I hope this can be some sort of flagship facility for Canada,” says Karsten. “It will inspire those who hear about it to ask questions. At the end of the day, this initiative is about putting this notion of resource efficiency back into people’s minds.”