Research Vision
From MTUGreenComputing
Today's computing community faces two grand challenges.
The first challenge is to make computing systems secure. Information security has become the Achilles' heel of organizations of all sizes nationwide. Security threats have increased in sophistication, frequency and complexity in the past couple of decades. As national infrastructures become intertwined with global networks, this leaves valuable information assets vulnerable to the rapidly escalating threats over the Internet. Numerous efforts have been undertaken by the security community, however, organizations and home users are still being attacked at an alarming rate.
The second challenge is to develop green computing systems. Recent escalating energy prices and the widespread adoption of Information Technology (IT) have thrown the spotlight on the environmental impact of computing devices and infrastructures. For example, the power consumption of enterprise data centers in the U.S. doubled between 2000 and 2005, and will likely triple again in the next few years. Some analysts predict that IT infrastructure power usage will soon cost more than the hardware itself.
The focus on sustainable computing has been growing rapidly in the past few years. Sustainable computing is the study and practice of supporting critical computing needs by using computing resources in a sustainable, energy-efficient, and eco-friendly manner. The term sustainable computing, is often used with green computing or green IT. The latter two emphasize being "environmentally friendly" and "energy efficient", while sustainable computing focuses on being "sustainable" in a broader sense.
The research vision of the investigator is to study and promote sustainable computing without sacrificing performance and security in computing systems to build a sustainable future. The investigator advocates a holistic, balanced, life-cycle management approach that stretches from performance, to security, to power, to waste, to application, and to education. Principles such as economic viability, social responsibility, and environmental impact must be taken into account as a whole when designing, implementing and managing computer systems. Sustainable computing represents a dramatic change in the priority of the IT industry from its traditional economic cost/benefit model to the new sustainable model.
