CNS Core: Small: Managing Electrical and Thermal Energy in Sustainable Computing Systems

Sustainable computing systems operate on zero-carbon renewable energy harvested from their environment, such as solar or wind, and stored in batteries. Importantly, renewable-powered systems may be deployed in many different climates that subject them to a wide range of ambient temperatures that significantly alter the efficiency and correctness of these systems' underlying components, including their processors, batteries, solar cells, and clocks.

Unfortunately, current systems are either designed for a narrow and ideal temperature range, and thus are often unreliable under even slight temperature variations, or must consume significant additional energy to maintain an ideal temperature within a narrow window, which significantly reduces their energy-efficiency. To address the problem, this project proposes fundamental research on the design of sustainable renewable-powered systems that are ectothermic in that they jointly manage and adapt to variations in the electrical and thermal energy available in their environment to optimize their energy-efficiency, performance, and reliability.

While the temperature responses of individual system components are well-known, ectothermic design takes a holistic systems approach that exploits relationships between components and their environment to co-optimize system-wide energy-efficiency, correctness, performance, and reliability. To this end, this project will develop methods for understanding, modeling, and exploiting the dependencies between computation, heat generation, the ambient environment, renewable energy availability, and the workload.

This project includes numerous broader impacts. The project has the potential for significant societal impact and positively address the climate concerns of computing by improving the energy-efficiency, correctness, performance, and reliability of sustainable renewable-powered computer systems. Our project also has the potential for technical impact by improving the design of renewable-powered systems at all scales--from small embedded platforms to large data centers.

This project plans to engage in multiple educational activities, including giving tutorials that focus on the relationship between computing and energy consumption at UMass summer programs for high school students in engineering and computing, and integrating ectothermic design into graduate and undergraduate courses. Finally, the project will emphasize the recruitment of students from under-represented groups in computing.

This proposal is funded in part from the DCL on Design for Sustainability in Computing (NSF-22-060)

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.