Yuvraj Agarwal http://mesl.ucsd.edu/yuvraj/

Title: From Energy Efficient Computing to Energy Efficient Buildings

Abstract: Managing the energy consumption of computing devices is of critical importance given the limited battery lifetime of mobile platforms, and the increasing carbon footprint of mains powered PCs and servers. Traditional mechanisms to save energy such as shutting down (or duty-cycling) either individual subsystems or entire platforms do not work well in practice since they often come at the cost of usability or loss of functionality. In the first part of my talk, I will show that we can improve energy efficiency through system architectures that seek to design and exploit "collaboration" among heterogeneous but functionally similar subsystems. Using collaboration, individual subsystems or even entire platforms can be shut down more aggressively to reduce their energy usage. I have built several systems that exploit this central idea to demonstrate energy savings across a broad class of devices, and in this talk I will show its application in reducing PC energy usage by 70% on average. While computing is indeed part of the problem due to its increasing carbon footprint, in the second part of my talk, I will show that computing is also part of the solution, where it can be used to make other systems more energy efficient. In particular, I will focus on sensing and control solutions that we have designed and deployed within enterprise buildings to make them more energy efficient and sustainable. I will show that by using fine-grained occupancy information gathered from battery powered wireless sensors the energy consumption of the HVAC system within a building can be reduced dramatically, saving up to 40% in a test deployment. I will also describe our smart energy meter that can measure the energy usage of plug-loads within a building as well as provide a mechanism to control these loads based on a number of policies.

Bio and Talk Title/Abstract

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Bio: Yuvraj Agarwal is a Research Scientist in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of California San Diego, where he also completed his PhD. His research interests are at the intersection of Systems and Networking and Embedded Systems, and he is particularly interested in research problems that benefit from using hardware insights to build more scalable and efficient systems. In recent years, his work has focused on Green Computing, Mobile Computing, Privacy and Energy Efficient Buildings. In 2012, he was awarded the "Outstanding Faculty Award for Sustainability" given by the UCSD Chancellor. He is a member of the IEEE, ACM and USENIX.