Colloquim Speakers - NIU - Computer Science

Northern Illinois University

Computer Science

Fall 2009 Graduate Colloqium Speaker

When: Thursday, October 29, 2009, 3:30 p.m.
Where:  PM 253
Lecture:  Towards Green Computing in Clouds
Dr. Gregor von Laszewski Speaker: Dr. Gregor von Laszewski is conducting state-of-the-art work in cloud computing and GreenIT at Indiana University as part of the Future Grid project. Before joining Indiana University he was at the Rochester Intsitute of Technology where he was a member of the computer science department faculty and the Director of RIT’s Center for Advancing the Study of Cyberinfrastructure. Prior to that, he worked between 1996 and 2007 for Argonne National Laboratory, where he was last a scientist and a fellow of the Computation Institute at University of Chicago. He received a Masters Degree in 1990 from the University of Bonn, Germany, and a Ph.D. in 1996 from Syracuse University in computer science. He has been involved in grid computing since the term was coined. Current research interests are in the areas of GreenIT, grid & cloud computing, and GPGPUs. He is best known for his efforts in making grids usable and initiating the Java Commodity Grid Kit, which provides a basis for many grid-related projects including the Globus toolkit (http://www.cogkits.org). His web page is located at
http://cyberaide.org .

Abstract: Recently, electricity usage has become a major IT concern for data centers. In fact, the electricity costs for running and cooling computers generally are considered a major portion of the IT budget. As reported by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, 61 billion kilowatt-hours of power was consumed in data centers in 2006, which is 1.5% of all US electricity consumption, worthy of $4.5 billion, and expected to double by 2011. In this presentation, Dr. von Laszewski will discuss current efforts to improve the effectiveness of data centers while using green scheduling algorithms, virtualization, and clouds. He will also provide an example on how to reduce the carbon footprint by using specially tuned algorithms using GPGPU’s exposed as a Cloud service for flowcytometry.

Co-sponsored by the Graduate Colloquium Committee and the Department of Computer Science.