Green IT the Theme of UC Research to Be Presented in Baltimore

How can laptop users be kinder to the environment by using less power? University of Cincinnati computer science doctoral student Dippy Aggarwal will be among the leaders in their fields who are sharing emerging research and career interests at the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing Conference, Oct. 3-6, in Baltimore. She’ll present early results of her research in a poster presentation, “Leveraging Power Analytics and Linked Data for Enterprise Computing,” on Wednesday, Oct. 3.

Aggarwal’s presentation evolved from a summer 2011 internship at the Digital Enterprise Research Institute (DERI) in Galway, Ireland.  Her project focused on green and sustainable IT, which aims to capture the ecological footprint attributable to IT.

The project seeks a solution to an organization’s challenge for reducing its ecological footprint in two aspects: power analytics challenge, and information management challenge. The power analytics challenge involves providing a visibility to the end-user about the power consumption of their device in real-time. The information management challenge strives to address data integration by providing a model for linking information concerning devices within an organization.

“Green technology – making the usage of computers and other devices more environmentally friendly – is an emerging and a high-interest field,” explains Aggarwal.

The project explores how linked data technologies could be leveraged for IT systems energy management and provides a comparative study of the few existing technologies for energy metering models including Microsoft Joulemeter and Power Estimation by Equation Modeling.

Aggarwal developed a dashboard system, or user interface, that utilizes an equation system approach to take instant power readings and calculate power consumption of the product in real-time. The team tested the dashboard on Mac and Dell systems. Future results of the research will examine life cycle analysis of the devices.

Additional future research, says Aggarwal, is aimed at extending the model to monitor energy consumption of several machines at one time, in order to observe the energy consumption of an entire team, unit or organization. The Ireland research team, headed by Edward Curry, unit leader for Green and Sustainable IT Domain at DERI, is also pursuing how to expand the model to apply to printers and data centers.

Aggarwal says the conference draws top industry leaders such as Microsoft and Google. Her conference trip and presentation were supported by a Grace Hopper Regional Consortium Scholarship.

Aggarwal is pursuing her PhD under the direction of Karen Davis, a UC professor of electrical and computer engineering. Aggerwal's research emphasis is on restructuring the enterprise data warehouse design to adapt it to cloud database platforms.

The Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing is a series of conferences designed to bring the research and career interests of women in computing to the forefront. Presenters are leaders in their respective fields, representing industrial, academic and government communities. Leading researchers present their current work, while special sessions focus on the role of women in today’s technology fields, including computer science, information technology, research and engineering.