A new project on Green information systems will start in January 2010, with the participation of Politecnico di Milano. The GAMES project (Green Active Management of Energy in IT Service centres) will be funded under the 7th EU Framework Program on ICT – Information and Communication Technologies under the topic ICT for Energy efficiency.
The vision of the GAMES project is for a new generation of energy efficient
IT Service Centres. With the unprecedented digitisation of business and government
processes across Europe, energy efficiency of IT Systems and IT Service Centres
is dramatically emerging as one of the most critical environmental challenges
to be dealt with.
A first yet partial answer to the energy challenges is offered by the emerging
IT Service Centre paradigm, in which the available computing resources are
shared by several different users. However, current tools and methods for
assessing and managing energy efficiency at the IT Service Centre level were
designed to operate in isolation, not taking into account all the interrelations
between the different layers (business/applications, infrastructure, facility)
and the effect of these interrelations on energy consumption.
The GAMES project aims at developing a set of innovative methodologies and
Open Source ICT tools for designing and managing energy efficiency in IT Service
Centres, by combining all the three above layers. This will be done by: 1)
delivering a methodology and a web toolset for the holistic design of green
IT service centres, trading-off Quality of Service, performance, virtual and
physical resource allocation and overall energy efficiency, 2) enriching the
GAMES toolset by implementing advanced algorithms for closely aligning applications'
demands for power with the resource availability, and combining these algorithms
with data mining technologies; 3) complementing these design tools and methodology
in a run-time environment for integrated sensing, monitoring and adaptive
control, capable of assessing in real time to a what extent the implemented
course of actions will improve energy efficiency.
The main expected outcome will be to increase energy efficiency in IT Service
Centres by up to 25%. The effectiveness of the proposed solutions will be
validated through extensive real life partner testbeds located in Italy and
Germany.
The role of Politecnico di Milano in the project will be mainly in the development
of new methods and tools for designing energy-aware information systems, including
optimization tools to be applied both at
design and at run time to optimize services and infrastructure parameters.
Adaptivity within an active control loop involving both service, infrastructure
and context information and control will be studied, designing new adaptation
mechanisms based on context and interlayer feedbacks.
The project Green Information Systems (Green IS) proposed by prof. Barbara Pernici has been selected on an international level for the IBM Faculty award in 2009.
The proposal concerns green technologies for service-based
information systems. While Green IT in the past years has been studying the
energy impact at the infrastructure level, research is missing in the evaluation
of the energy impact at the service level. Methods and tools for building
information systems as services compositions are focusing on the Quality of
Service characteristics of the service composition, but not on the impact
of QoS requirements on the underlying infrastructure.
In the project we will study how QoS requirements at the service level can
be seen as constraints at the infrastructure level for energy efficiency evaluations,
and how QoS and energy evaluation at the infrastructure level can dynamically
influence the service requests QoS at the service level.
This work is based on previous research work on adaptive service compositions
and on QoS evaluation conducted in the Information Systems group of Politecnico
di Milano.
In the research work proposed in this proposal, energy efficiency will be
considered at the service level in terms of new type of Key Performance Indicators
(sometimes called Green Performance Indicators - GPI) and the infrastructure
at the service level the energy impact of the infrastructure will be represented
as context information for the service composition. It will be assumed that
both the service composition and the underlying infrastructure can present
an adaptive behaviour, and specifically the service composition QoS or structure
can be dynamically modifies during execution, and the context can both change
due to external variables (such as temperature) and it can be changed by modifications
of service requests.
The relationship between GPI and context QoS and energy parameters will be
studied. Adaptivity techniques for controlling the system considering the
service characteristics and profiles will be studied. Adaptation will be specifically
studied at the service level, focusing of the energy impact of services in
a given context.
The results of the project will be a proposal for new types of Quality dimensions
at the service level, defining Green Performance Indicators, a general method
for evaluating the Service Energy impact in a given context, and algorithms
to choose among adaptation alternatives at the service level considering,
in addition to the commonly used QoS parameters, also Green Performance Indicators
and context information related to energy efficiency of the system.
Massimo Bertoncini, Barbara Pernici, Ioan Salomie, and Stefan Wesner, GAMES: Green Active Management of Energy in IT Service centres, Caise Forum, Hammamet, Tunisia, June 2010
Alexandre
Mello Ferreira, Kyriakos Kritikos, Barbara Pernici, Energy-aware Design of
Service-Based Applications, ICSOC, Stockholm, Nov. 2009
D. Ardagna, C. Cappiello, M. Lovera, B. Pernici, M. Tanelli, Active energy-aware
management of business-process based applications, ServiceWave 2008,
B. Pernici, D. Ardagna, C. Cappiello, Business Process Design: Towards Service- Based Green Information Systems, in E-Government, ICT Professionalism and Competences, Service Science, IFIP Series, 2008