Climate debate and carbon dioxide emission reduction are fostering the development of — green policies — with the aim of improving environmental performance and putting global warming and the enhancement of resource usage at the top of the list of the world’s global challenges. Information and Communication Technology (ICT) plays a key role in this greening process. Since environmental policies started to become of strategic importance worldwide, ICT applications have been considered as part of the solution as they can significantly improve the environmental performance of all the other sectors of the world economy by reducing their energy consumption and facilitating more environmentally sustainable energy generation using renewable sources. More recently, awareness of the potential impact of carbon emissions of the ICT sector itself has rapidly increased. Overall, ICT accounts for between 2% and 4% of global CO2 emissions and is projected to reach 10% in 5-10 years. The challenge for ICT is to be able to reduce its footprint, while maintaining a high growth rate of communication infrastructures. These two issues are not disjointed. In fact, as more and more systems make use of ICT to reduce their own energy consumption, it would be of paramount importance for ICT to be as green as possible in order to reduce the global carbon footprint of the planet. The general goal of the Green Cloud project is to develop a systematic set of methods for the design of novel resource allocation policies for energy-aware Clouds. Energy and cost savings are pursued by dynamically allocating computing resources of geographically distributed data centers.
Within the Green Cloud project, students developed a novel interdisciplinary approach based on expertise from several research areas: Cloud technologies, networking, optimization, performance evaluation and energy production and distribution.
Principal Academic Tutor
Antonio Capone
Electronics and Information, Politecnico di Milano
Academic Tutors
Danilo Ardagna
Electronics and Information, Politecnico di Milano
Giuliana Carello
Electronics and Information, Politecnico di Milano
Federico Della Croce
Control and Computer Engineering, Politecnico di Milano
Marco Mellia
Electronics, Politecnico di Torino
Michela Meo
Electronics, Politecnico di Torino
External institution
Alcatel Lucent
IBM Italia
Lutech Spa
External Tutors
Fabrizio Leone
Lutech Spa
Massimo Leoni
IBM Italia
Carlo Spinelli
Alcatel Lucent
Team members
TEAM A
Stefano Viganò [Team controller and Project Communication Coordinator], Management, Economics and Industrial Engineering
Ahmed Allam, Computer Engineering
Riccardo Chiodaroli, Computer Engineering
Francesco Lunetta, Computer Engineering
Stefano Ziller, Mathematical Engineering