The presentation of paper titled "Challenges and complexities in application of LCA approaches in the case of ICT for a sustainable future" in ICT4S'14 Conference

1. Challenges and complexities in
application of LCA approaches in the
case of ICT for a sustainable future
Reza Farrahi Moghaddam, Fereydoun Farrahi Moghaddam,
Thomas Dandres, Yves Lemieux, Réjean Samson, Mohamed Cheriet
ICT4S’14, August 24-27, 2014, Stockholm, Sweden
August 24, ConverStation I

2. Sustainability Pentagon
• 3-pillar sustainability model:
• ‘Respect’ to and ‘focus’ on all three aspects: Nature, Society, and
Economy
• Extended sustainability model:
• To include all actors and actions: Actor/Action Model
• Moving from ‘pillars’ to ‘actors’: society  societies
• Adding two additional categories for smaller actors:
• Enterprises (businesses) and individuals (people)
• Multiple ‘perspectives’ could be drawn from it 
• ‘Inclusion’ and ‘Engagement’ by ‘Understanding’
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3. Sustainability Pentagon, Cont’d
• More categories can be added in future
• Many actors, such as governments, would not
require new categories, and will be mapped using
‘decomposability’ approach
• Everybody
1. Inclusion: Everybody-Together
2. Responsibility: Everybody-in-the-Loop
• Moving beyond reports and projects
• Sustainable ‘way’ of business and living
• Seamless integration of LCA and other
approaches
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4. Differential Metric/distance
for Complex Systems
• Enormous number of components
• Many components follow the same ‘internal’ model
• Common practice: Aggregating their footprint
• However, they may be in different ‘contexts’
• We represent the context with some ‘attributes’ assigned to a component
• Modeling the context (neighborhood) would be costly, therefore
‘over simplified’ practices are common
• However, context changes are: ‘nonlinear’, large-scale, and complex
• The need for a new distance function/metric to ‘preserve’ the
impact of those components with small self ecological footprint
(EF) but with big contextual sensitivity and therefore potential EF
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5. Differential Metric/distance
for Complex Systems, Cont’d
• Assessment of a Technology vs Assessment of a Product:
• An application of the proposed metric
• The upstream or specific region could be ‘masked’ using the ‘attributes’
• The attributes of components are different from the
attributers of footprint:
• Attributes of footprint: Energy Consumption, GHG Emissions, etc.
• Attributes of components: Geo Location, Systemic Location, Time, etc.
• Similar debate on electric vehicle (EV) can be analyzed using
the proposed approach:
• The purpose is not to give the green light to a technology:
• It is to see how that technology could approach to ‘zero’ impact
• ‘Zero footprint’ is the new ‘footprint reduction’
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6. Differential Metric/distance
for Complex Systems, Cont’d
G1: Baseline graph (G2, G1): Differential graph G1 + attributes (not mergeable)
The new distance function:
• The full paper will be
ready by the next
week.
• Application: Micro-
registration and
multicasting in OTT
SVoD/IPTV
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7. ICT Specialty: Management/Intelligence (M/I)
• ICT: A perfect example of businesses based on ‘intangible’
properties
• The physics of intangible properties: There is ‘zero’ physics
• Considerable footprint assoc. with:
• processing of properties’ information
• Great potential for footprint reduction:
• Smart Management even without hardware upgrade
• However, considerable investment to modify low-level software
• Specific Example: ‘Smart DVFS’, a step beyond DVFS and
virtualization
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8. ICT Specialty: Management/Intelligence (M/I),
Cont’d: Smart DVFS
• DVFS has been around:
• An alternative to consolidation
• Higher availability/Lower reaction time
• Less footprint: i) less electricity consumption (EC), ii) less hardware
replacement, and iii) less network and storage traffic and therefore less
associated EC for VM image transfers.
• Beyond VMs: Containers (Virtualization of ‘processes’)
• Next step: Smart DVFS
• Multi-objective optimization w.r.t. EC, profit, and EF
• Smart heuristic scheduling of tasks (jobs)
• Electricity Grid: mix and price vary over time (hours) and (zones)
• A network of geographically-distributed data centers
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9. ICT Specialty: Management/Intelligence (M/I),
Cont’d: Smart DVFS
• All methods are DVFS-enabled
• CPAS: Proposed smart DVFS (Carbon-Profit Aware Scheduler)
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10. Fast Links to Papers and Web Pages
This Paper
(http://arxiv.org/abs/1403.2798)
MEIO Paper
(http://arxiv.org/abs/1404.6227)
Profile (http://ca.linkedin.com/in/rezafm)
DVFS Thesis
(http://espace.etsmtl.ca/1274/1/FARRAHI_MOGH
ADDAM_Fereydoun.pdf)
QoE – Multi-Tenant Resource Sharing
(http://arxiv.org/abs/1407.5527v3) New-distance Paper
TBF
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11. Thank you!
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