Towards Green Information Retrieval

Day - Time: 18 July 2014, h.11:00
Place: Area della Ricerca CNR di Pisa - Room: C-40
Speakers
  • Ana Freire (Yahoo Research Lab Barcelona)
Referent

Raffaele Perego

Abstract

Web search engines have to deal with a rapid increase of information, demanded by high incoming query traffic. This situation has driven companies to build geographically distributed data centres housing thousands of computers, consuming enormous amounts of electricity and requiring a huge infrastructure around. At this scale, even minor efficiency improvements result in large financial savings.
This seminar will introduce the problem of Green Information Technologies (Green IT) and more concretely, Green Information Retrieval (Green IR), by exploring several (still few) approaches for developing sustainable search engines data centres. The talk mainly focuses on recent models that propose the use of only the necessary number of machines for solving queries, depending on the incoming query traffic. These models reduce the environmental impact and, subsequently, increase the financial savings.