Category Archive

Optimization

“AI for Green IT”, greenwashing ou révolution?

Posted on June 29, 2024 by Renaud Pawlak

Il est de notoriété publique que l’IA est une technologie énergivore, et il est usuel de penser que l’IA n’est pas compatible avec l’éco-conception des logiciels. Mais évidemment, comme attendu, rien n’est aussi binaire qu’il n’y paraît. D’abord, il va sans dire que la technologie est récente et va être améliorée, optimisée, voire révolutionnée dans les prochaines années (de la même manière que la blockchain a vu sa consommation énergétique drastiquement diminuer au fil des générations successives). On peut par exemple noter cette approche consistant à réinventer le hardware pour qu’il soit intrinsèquement conçu pour l’apprentissage automatique. Ou encore de

0

Intervention de Cinchéo à “Tech4Climate?” – L’éco-conception logicielle : quelques constats et conseils pour démarrer

Posted on June 13, 2022 by Renaud Pawlak

Le 9 juin 2022, j’étais invité à intervenir dans l’atelier “Les acteurs du numérique au service de la transition” de l’événement “Tech4Climate?” organisé par le groupe Constellation. Pour celles et ceux qui n’ont pas eu la chance d’y assister, voici quelques photos et le résumé des messages que j’ai fait passer.

0

Food for thought about Software Eco-Design

Posted on April 15, 2022 by Renaud Pawlak

Things are not simple when it comes to Software Eco-Design. Eco-Design is about maximizing a software Efficiency function of Usage, which can be defined as a ratio : Efficiency(U) = Utility(U) / Resources(U) (U = Usage, a parameter) Utility is related to the amount of useful work you can do in a unit of time (the word useful is important, because it depends on the context and what you need to achieve). Resources, for software is the amount of computation, data, I/O you use, which in turn, corresponds to an amount of energy (electricity) and hardware resources (servers, routers, wires,

0

MC2: a tool to remotely monitor computer resources

Posted on June 11, 2021 by Renaud Pawlak

For more than a year now, EASYTEAM and Cinchéo have been working on a project that aims at creating new methods and tools to help IT departments to control the carbon footprint linked to digital services. It is a vast and complicated topic and a lot needs to be achieved. With MC2 (say M-C-square), we are contributing a small and modest part to the tooling ecosystem. In this post, I will explain the principles of MC2 and how it works. The source code is fully available on Github: https://github.com/cincheo/mc2. NOTE: MC2 it is still work in progress and is a

0

Back to the Future: let’s stop buying new Laptops and Smartphones ;)

Posted on December 21, 2020 by Renaud Pawlak

When I was a teenager, I used to go to the center of Paris to buy specific parts to build my PC myself: sound cards, video cards, power blocks, hard drive, CPU, fans, memory, you name it. Not only it was fun and instructive, but it was also good for the planet.

0

AI vs. Maths

Posted on November 25, 2020 by Renaud Pawlak

Quite recently, I had the chance to discuss with Philippe de Reffye, a French researcher who spent his life studying how plants grow. He built a generic mathematical model that can simulate the growth of any plant, assuming we can mesure some environmental parameters to calibrate the model. He wrote a very complete book about it (in French). The interesting point from my perspective is that his work managed to lower the computational complexity of simulating plant growth from an exponential to a linear function. What would take days to calculate can now be done in seconds, and it grows

0