Welcome to Collaborative Research Centre SFB 912

Addressing the increasing energy demand of global internet usage and the resulting ecological impact of it, the visionary goal of the collaborative research center HAEC (“Highly Adaptive Energy-Efficient Computing”) is to research technologies to enable computing systems with high energy efficiency without compromising on high performance.

Certainly a straightforward way for improving energy efficiency is to reduce the energy consumption of every individual hardware component involved. However, more important is to understand how the software system can be adapted to the hardware and vice versa. Today, computational problems are written in software without any opportunity for being written to generate energy-aware code, and then the code is mapped onto generic hardware configurations of parallel machines. As the computational problems which are being executed require a certain amount of computational execution with complex and problem specific intercommunication between the computations, a highly adaptive hardware system which can optimize its configuration according to the needs of a software system could generate a much higher level of efficiency. In addition, the energy efficiency could also be improved by adaptivity of the software to the computational problem. For this, system states of the application and hardware system need to be monitored and taken into account during run-time as well.

To achieve the goal of an integrated approach of highly adaptive energy-efficient computing, the problem is approached at all levels of technology involved, the hardware, the computer architecture and operating system, the software modeling as well as the application modeling and runtime control levels. A novel concept (HAEC box) of how computers can be built by utilizing innovative ideas of optical and wireless chip-to-chip communications shall be explored. A design-time and a run-time real-time control loop will be researched which shall be controlling the energy tradeoff based on the current hardware state as well as the context aware application requirement, taking the required utility into account. The HAEC collaborative research center is a first attempt to achieve high adaptivity and energy efficiency with an integrated approach. The technology being explored has the potential for HAEC to take on leadership in the scientific community on how to design future computing systems, and also, as it matures, to become a pace setter and to have impact in the industry.

A short version of the proposal can be found here.