Green computing can mean different things to different people—and interests.
Environmental organizations tend to embrace the definition of green computing that stresses practices that lead to efficient and eco-friendly use of computing resources.
But businesses are also interested in green computing, particularly when it creates energy efficiencies that reduce their costs.
Coskun, who has MS and PhD degrees in Computer Science and Engineering, is an assistant professor in the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department at Boston University. Her research interests include temperature and energy management, 3-D stack architectures, computer architecture, and embedded systems. You can find out even more about her by checking out our interview published in July 2012.
Coskun will address a wide range of topics in her columns. “I will be writing about energy-efficient software and hardware design strategies, opportunities for electricity cost savings and battery-life extension, system-level policies for energy and thermal management, and smart infrastructures for improving efficiency,” she says.
Her September column focuses on energy-efficient cooling strategies for servers, which require striking a balance between cooling energy and leakage power. “You can reduce the cooling energy used by enabling the processor temperatures to rise within safe limits, “ she says. “However, leakage power increases at high temperatures and can cause excessive energy waste. “
Her column explains how to experimentally analyze the trade-off between a server’s cooling and leakage and how to use that analysis to design energy-efficient cooling strategies—not only for servers, but for computing systems in general.
For more details, be sure to check out her debut column in the September issue.