June 15, 2013
Luca Gammaitoni, NiPS Lab director, spoke yesterday at the CHIST-ERA 2013 Conference in Brussels.
The CHIST-ERA ERA-NET is a consortium of funding organisations in Europe with programmes supporting ICST. The consortium is itself supported by the European Union’s Future & Emerging Technologies scheme (FET). CHIST-ERA promotes multidisciplinary and transnational ICT research with the potential to lead to significant breakthroughs. The funding organisations jointly support research projects selected in the framework of CHIST-ERA, in order to reinforce European capabilities in selected topics. The Call 2013, to be published in October, addresses two new and hot topics: Adaptive Machines in Complex Environments and Heterogeneous Distributed Computing
L. Gammaitoni presented a talk on: Heterogeneous Distributed Computing: how to address the powering issue
It is a common understanding that ICT is the key engine of growth in modern society. The energy consumption and carbon dioxide emission from the expanding ICT use, however, is unsustainable. New methods are required to make ICT technology more energy efficient but also the development of new self-powered, energy-harvesting technologies that would enable micro- and nano-scale systems that consume zero power through the harvesting of waste energy from the environment are required. Such technologies provide an opportunity for Europe to lead and generate significant economic benefit whilst simultaneously addressing climate change, healthcare and manufacturing efficiency benefits. In this talk we will briefly address the two sides of the ICT-Energy problem: the decrease of energy dissipation in present ICT devices and the increase of energy efficiency in harvesting technologies (see ZEROPOWER Strategic Research Agenda, Nanoenergy Letters, 4, p.6, 2012). We need to solve these two problems in order to bridge the gap between energy demand and energy request in mobile/distributed ICT devices. Both tasks require advances on the very same scientific topic: the management of energy transformation processes at nanoscale.