GreenStar - Dirty data: The Internet's giant carbon footprint

Professor Mohamed Cheriet, Director of Synchromedia, was announced today as a new Tier 1 Canada Research Chair in Smart Sustainable Cloud Computing.

 
Internet services have undergone multiple revolutions over the past 50 years, from snail-mail to household ultra-broadband utility. Today, the tremendous demands of the growing human society are pushing the evolution of Internet-based automation technologies, particularly for knowledge dissemination and intensive information processing. 

Data centres, regarded as the “brain” of the Internet, are required to host increasingly critical applications, thereby consuming a huge amount of energy. This raises new questions, in terms of scalability, resiliency and operational cost-effectiveness, and environmental concerns in particular.

Canada Research Chair Mohamed Cheriet is addressing issues related to a sustainable smart eco-cloud platform, which is a virtual and analytical system capable of deep, complex computation and intelligent behaviours performed in an energy-efficient and eco-friendly way. By means of smart meters, data collectors, and analytical gears that acquire knowledge about the ecosystem and all the actors involved, including end-users, eco-cloud services are able to react immediately and “just in time”, to establish automated control processes. Each component of the eco-cloud model can affect the others, and be affected by them, creating a constantly evolving relationship in which they will be flexible enough and adaptable enough to better deliver their service and to optimize resource utilization. This will pave the way for a new class of approaches addressing fundamental issues of machine learning and artificial intelligence systems facing critical mass applications, and a rapidly growing, changing and innovative cyber society based on the eco-cloud.

The results of Cheriet’s research will leverage research on smart technologies, leading to the establishment of new inter-sector and inter-disciplinary collaborations with academia and corporations.