Energy Challenges for ICT

Abstract

The energy consumption from the expanding use of information and communications technology (ICT) is unsustainable with present drivers, and it will impact heavily on the future climate change. However, ICT devices have the potential to contribute significantly to the reduction of CO 2 emission and enhance resource efficiency in other sectors, e.g., transportation (through intelligent transportation and advanced driver assistance systems and self-driving vehicles), heating (through smart building control), and manufacturing (through digital automation based on smart autonomous sensors). To address the energy sustainability of ICT and capture the full potential of ICT in resource efficiency, a multidisciplinary ICT-energy community needs to be brought together covering devices, microarchitectures, ultra large-scale integration (ULSI), high-performance computing (HPC), energy harvesting, energy storage, system design, embedded systems, efficient electronics, static analysis, and computation. In this chapter, we introduce challenges and opportunities in this emerging field and a common framework to strive towards energy-sustainable ICT.

Fundamental Limits in Dissipative Processes during Computation

“…Further progress in this direction is thwarted by the amount of energy dissipated during switch operations: the resulting power density for these switches at maximum packing density would be on the order of 1 MW/cm 2 , orders of magnitude higher than the practical air-cooling limit. [1] There is little doubt that managing efficiently the use of energy, i.e., drastically reducing heat production, is a key aspect to be considered in designing future computing systems, especially for applications in smart sensors and Internet of Things devices, where the small dimension and the mobility characteristics require innovative solutions [2].…”

Memory-Aware Scheduling for Fixed Priority Hard Real-Time Computing Systems

“…it indicates that with the increasing number of transistors (see also Fig. 2.5), the total power of microprocessor units is still increasing over time despite the reduction in power density [10].…”

“…Equally important, lowpower devices such as embedded systems, either deployed using single-core or multi-core platforms, are being driven by applications such as video streaming and sensor data processing, showing an increase in peak power dissipation. Thus, some modern low-power microprocessors may offer operating modes consuming low power, but the more and more computationally intensive tasks require them to signicantly increase the power consumption [10]. As a result, it can also be seen in Fig.…”

“…10 shows the average feasibility values for the three types of task sets considered (from high-memory bounded to CPU-bounded) when the DRAM peak temperature threshold is set to 60 • C.…”

Synthesis and characterisation of wide-bandgap semiconductor nanostructures towards opto-electronic applications

“…Yet, in the era of information, the demand is increasing more than ever before. Looking at the information and communication technology (ICT) sector only, it represents 4-6% of the global power consumption in 2017 with a predicted increase up to 20% by 2030 [11].…”