NiPS Summer School 2016 "ICT-Energy: Energy consumption in future ICT devices”
 

From August 13 to 16, 2016 we had the opportunity to attend the NiPS Summer School 2016 in Aalborg, Denmark.
 
The summer school was fielded in four thematic groups of lectures where each block consisted of four consecutive talks. It started off with a block of four talks about the Basics on the physics of energy transformations at micro and nanoscales by Prof. L. Gammaitoni, which established the foundations about energy and the theoretical limits to energy in computing devices seen as physical systems. Furthermore, we got an overview of the energy dissipation in present ICT devices.
 
In the more application oriented Introduction to energy harvesting and distributed autonomous mobile devices, Prof. S. Roundy explained how we can retrieve energy from the environment, especially from vibrating surfaces using electrodynamic, piezoeletric and electrostatic effects.
 
The third block was about Software and energy aware computing. One central issue was the question how one can measure the energy usage of software. Prof. K. Eder and Dr. S. Kerrison achieved this goal by soldering cables to specific parts of a circuit board. A different approach using static analysis of the source code was presented by Prof. J. Gallagher.
 
Finally, the last part was about High performance computing and systems, lectured by Prof. V. Heuveline from Heidelberg. Using the computing centre URZ in Heidelberg as an example, he illustrated the energy consumption of today's data centres. The second part dealt with the basic concepts and main approaches to parallel programming. He mentioned possible ways of saving energy using energy aware numerics, i.e. how we can modify present algorithms to make them more energy efficient. The last part of Prof. Heuveline's talk, and therefore of the whole summer school, combined many of the topics we have talked about in the chances and challenges of Multicore and Manycore Technology. The summer school was closed with an interesting and forward looking sentence, namely “Energy savings are possible while maintaining performance.“
 
We would like to thank the University of Aalborg, especially Prof. K. Larsen for the warm welcome, the NiPS Lab, in particular Prof. L. Gammaitoni and C.  Mezzetti for the organization and last but not least the EMCL, whose head is Prof. V. Heuveline, for the opportunity to join in this summer school.

Isabell Dehner, Saskia Haupt, Fabian Kißler und Alexander Zeilmann