A major bottleneck in the UK Government's drive to reduce energy consumption and CO2 emissions in the non-domestic sector has been the lack of involvement of building users in implementing the required measures. This project will equip facilities managers, who are in the forefront of tackling the problem, with the localised data and analysis tools they can use to increase engagement with building users. These users, in turn, will gain opportunities to influence their preferred working environment - a major advance on the usual situation where they have no influence. There is increasing evidence of the economic impact associated with increased productivity derived from energy efficiency and improved working conditions. The project will develop a radically different, data-centred and negotiated approach to facilities management as a means to resolve the conflicting demands of occupant comfort and energy use. It will establish continuous, personalised information on environmental conditions and energy use in support of occupant engagement and negotiation between co-workers and with facilities management. The research will investigate the potential of personalised information in social and digitally-mediated negotiations to meet common energy and comfort needs, and develop the tools and procedures that facilities managers can utilise to improve user engagement and decide fairly between potentially conflicting demands between users and between users and efficient building operation. The project will deploy a previously developed pervasive sensing system, BuildAx, to capture data on environmental conditions, occupant behaviour (movement and activity) and personalised energy use at high spatial and temporal resolution, and map these data to continuous information in support of digitally-mediated negotiation between occupants and facilities managers. Approaches to staff-centred facilities management, including occupant-activated alerts, collective and individual action in working practices adaptation and reward-driven negotiation will be investigated.

Please see main (Glasgow) form

The years of 'happy scaling' are over and the fundamental challenges that the semiconductor industry faces, at both technology and device level, will impinge deeply upon the design of future integrated circuits and systems. This proposal brings together semiconductor device, circuit and system experts from academia and industry and e-scientists with strong grid expertise. Only by working in close collaboration, and adequately connected and resourced by e-science and Grid technology, can we understand and tackle the design complexity of nano-CMOS electronics, securing a competitive advantage for the UK electronics industry.Increasing variability in device characteristics and the need to introduce novel device architectures represent major challenges to scaling and integration for present and next generation nano-CMOS transistors and circuits. This will in turn demand revolutionary changes in the way in which future integrated circuits and systems are designed. Strong links must be established between circuit design, system design and fundamental device technology to allow circuits and systems to accommodate the individual behaviour of every transistor on a chip. Design paradigms must change to accommodate this increasing variability. Adjusting for new device architectures and device variability will add significant complexity to the design process, requiring orchestration of a broad spectrum of design tools by geographically distributed teams of device experts, circuit and system designers. This can only be achieved by embedding e-science technology and know-how across the whole nano-CMOS electronics design process and revolutionising the way in which these disparate groups currently work.This project's over-arching aim is to revolutionise existing nano-CMOS electronics research processes by developing the methodology and prototype technology of a nano-CMOS Design Grid. We use the term Grid to encompass computing technologies that allow distributed groups to collaborate by sharing designs, simulations, workflows, data sets and computation resources. This work will require a deep understanding of how electronics scientists, engineers and designers can work together to produce new methods and results. Through this process we will create Grid-savvy nano-CMOS e-Researchers able to Grid-enable their own simulations, to correctly annotate their own data, to design workflows reflecting their design processes, and share all these with other researchers in the nano-CMOS design space.

See Joint Proposal E241901

Energy efficiency is becoming increasingly important in today's world of battery powered mobile devices and power limited servers. While performance optimisation is a familiar topic for developers, few are even aware of the effects that source code changes will have on the energy profiles of their programs. Without knowledge of these effects, compiler and operating system writers cannot create automatic energy optimisers. To realise the needed energy savings, we require the capability to track energy consumption and associate it to code and data at a fine granularity. Furthermore, compilers and operating systems must exploit this capability to optimise applications automatically. This proposal presents a novel approach to software-centric modelling, measurement, accounting and optimisation of energy-efficiency on many-core systems. Energy consumption will be matched against programming language abstractions, from basic-blocks to functions, loops, and parallel constructs, and from variables to data structures, providing developers with the information that they need. The project will use this fine grained accounting to build novel compiler optimisations that target energy consumption. It will create low energy runtime systems that adapt to environmental changes. It will develop energy efficient operating system scheduling that manages multi-tasking for heterogeneous many-cores. The project aims to improve performance per Watt by at least 40%.