Energy sustainable user centric framework and algorithms to minimize power consumption by personal computers

Abstract

With the explosive development of the Information and Communication Technology (ICT) devices, the increase in energy consumption and heat dissipation by these devices poses the problem of an energy crisis and exacerbation of the greenhouse gas problem with global warming. Recently, ongoing focus on the environmental sustainability proliferating in various domains and sustainable computing/green computing has been getting increased attention. The principle aspects of sustainable computing is the reduction of energy requirement for running any computing infrastructure, energy longevity of computing equipment to reduce need for their replacement and ensuring energy consumption within the energy available from the renewable energy sources in the environment. Therefore, these factors are getting more attention and a lot of work has been carried out on “Green computing”, which represents an environmentally responsible way for the above discussed scenario by reducing the energy consumption, and also address to various environmental related issues such as waste management, greenhouse gases etc. An emerging issue of the power dissipation has imposed a very significant question on the system and software design and it is well understood that in the future, there will be a great demand for energy-sustainable software. Therefore, the vision of a sustainable planet and minimization of the energy consumed by computer systems motivated us to find more energy-sustainable computing methods for personal computers. Earlier, the computer systems were extremely inefficient with low computing power and high energy consumption. In newer computer systems, the average power requirements are decreased by almost 50% (nearly 100 watts to 50 watts) and standby power consumption stayed relatively constant at approximately 25 watts. The overall computer system power consumption is increasing however, the standby power consumption is decreasing.