High Performance Computing (HPC) has become an indispensable tool for the scientific community to perform simulations on models whose complexity would exceed the limits of a standard computer. An unfortunate trend concerning HPC systems is that their power consumption under high-demanding workloads increases. To counter this trend, hardware vendors have implemented power saving mechanisms in recent years, which has increased the variability in power demands of single nodes. These capabilities provide an opportunity to increase the energy efficiency of HPC applications. To utilize these hardware power saving mechanisms efficiently, their overhead must be analyzed. Furthermore, applications have to be examined for performance and energy efficiency issues, which can give hints for optimizations. This requires an infrastructure that is able to capture both, performance and power consumption information concurrently. The mechanisms that such an infrastructure would inherently support could further be used to implement a tool that is able to do both, measuring and tuning of energy efficiency. This thesis targets all steps in this process by making the following contributions: First, I provide a broad overview on different related fields. I list common performance measurement tools, power measurement infrastructures, hardware power saving capabilities, and tuning tools. Second, I lay out a model that can be used to define and describe energy efficiency tuning on program region scale. This model includes hardware and software dependent parameters. Hardware parameters include the runtime overhead and delay for switching power saving mechanisms as well as a contemplation of their scopes and the possible influence on application performance. Thus, in a third step, I present methods to evaluate common power saving mechanisms and list findings for different x86 processors. Software parameters include their performance and power consumption characteristics as well as the influence of power-saving mechanisms on these. To capture software parameters, an infrastructure for measuring performance and power consumption is necessary. With minor additions, the same infrastructure can later be used to tune software and hardware parameters. Thus, I lay out the structure for such an infrastructure and describe common components that are required for measuring and tuning. Based on that, I implement adequate interfaces that extend the functionality of contemporary performance measurement tools. Furthermore, I use these interfaces to conflate performance and power measurements and further process the gathered information for tuning. I conclude this work by demonstrating that the infrastructure can be used to manipulate power-saving mechanisms of contemporary x86 processors and increase the energy efficiency of HPC applications.

The global share from buildings towards energy usage in residential and commercial buildings have been increasing constantly reaching between 20% to 40% in developed countries and has overtook the other major sectors: industrial and transportation. Energy demand reduction in the building sector is important for Sweden to achieve national energy aims for reduced energy use in the future.  For this reason, energy efficiency measures in buildings today is one of the main objective for energy policy towards 2020 goals.   This project moves on the same path to find energy efficiency potential in Fridhemsskolan buildings in Gävle, Sweden by performing energy audit using IDA-ICE software to simulate energy performance for the buildings under study. In addition, measurements have been made on three of the school buildings named Hus 1, Hus 2 and Hus 3.   The results include different energy efficiency retrofits on each building and economic analysis of these retrofits for each building individually and for the whole buildings together. The presented measures are reducing working hours of the ventilation system in Hus 2, change of CAV system with VAV system in (Hus 1 and Hus 2) and lights changing to LED, s efficient lights and building envelope improvement which includes walls and roof extra insulation and windows replacement.   Replacement of the CAV system in Hus 1 and Hus 2 were not economically beneficial when considering their high cost compared to energy reduction that can be achieved by applying them. On the other hand, energy retrofits analysis showed that combination of the following energy efficiency measures is the most effective and profitable: extra insulation (walls and roof), windows replacement and lights change to LED in the three buildings. In addition to these measure is reducing running hours of the ventilation system in Hus 2.   Implementation of the recommended energy efficiency measures will save 120, 737 kWh/ year of the district heating and 21, 962 kWh/year electricity consumption with capital investment of 417, 396 SEK and 98, 957 SEK/ year cost saving with payback period of 4.2 years. These figures represent 40.3% and 18.1% reduction in district heating and electricity energy use respectively.   Since reducing working hours of ventilation system measure has no capital investment and have the highest figure of energy reduction it reduces payback period significantly. In case the amount of money saved by this measure doesn’t consider; payback period for the other measures which require capital investment will be 13.5 years and the energy saving in terms of cost will be 30, 874 SEK/ year.

In the production of pulp, paper and cardboard, a large amount of water is used daily. The water has to be purified in the internal purifying plant before it reaches the receiving body of water. In the biological purifying stage at the Stora Enso Skoghall mill, an aerated basin is used where the microorganisms, using oxygen, oxidize the organic material to carbon dioxide. The air is pumped from the bottom of the basin and the oxygen can then be transported from the air bubbles to the water through diffusion. The problem with aeration of waste water from the forest industry is that wood residues, such as fatty acids, are making the transport of oxygen in water more difficult. Previous studies show that adding salt improves aeration and the use of energy during the aeration process decreases. In many of the Swedish forest industries the electric power required for the aeration process is responsible for more than 50% of the total use of energy. The aim of this report is to study the aeration of waste water from a forest industry in order to make the aeration in the biological purification stage more energy efficient. The experimental part includes aeration experiments and measurement of surface tension when adding salt in clean and untreated process water. All experiments have been carried out in lab-scale at Karlstad University. The salts used during the study were sodium chloride, lime sludge and also precipitator dust, of which the two latter are by-products of pulping. The project has reached its goal, to compare and measure the speed of aeration when adding different salts to waste water from the forest industry in order to make the purification process more efficient.  This study shows that adding by-products may increase the speed of the aeration of waste water from the forest industry and decrease the use of energy during the aerobic treatment process. Adding precipitator dust to the fabrication water increases the speed of the aeration by 60%. The standard oxygen transfer rate (SOTR) decreased from 314tonnes O2/d to 118tonnes O2/d. The energy demand during the aeration process decreased by 100 MWh per day. / Vid framställning av massa, papper och kartong används dagligen stora mängder vatten som måste renas vid det interna reningsverket innan det når recipienten. En av industrierna är Stora Enso, Skogshalls bruk. I det biologiska reningessteget vid Skoghalls bruk används en luftad damm där mikroorganismer med hjälp av syre oxiderar det organiska materialet till koldioxid. Luft pumpas in från botten av dammen och syret kan transporteras från luftbubblorna till vattnet genom diffusion. Problemet vid syresättning av skogsindustriellt avloppsvattnet är att vedrester som exempelvis fettsyror följer med avloppsvattnet och försvårar syretransporten. Tidigare studier visar att vid tillsats av salt förbättras syresättningen och att energianvändningen vid luftningsprocessen minskar. De salter som valts i den här undersökningen är natriumklorid samt mesa och elfilteraska. Varav det två sista är biprodukter från massaframställningen. I många av Sveriges skogsindustrier står elen till luftningsprocessen för mer än 50 % av den totala energianvändningen. Det här arbetet syftar till att undersöka syresättningen av ett skogsindustriellt avloppsvatten med avsikt att energieffektivisera luftningen i det biologiska reningssteget. Den experimentella delen omfattar syresättningsförsök samt mätning av ytspänning vid tillsats av salt i både rent vatten och obehandlat processvatten. Samtliga försök har utförts i labbskala vid Karlstads universitet. Det här arbetet har uppnått sitt mål med att jämföra och mäta hastigheten av syresättning vid tillsats av olika salter i skogsindustriellt avloppsvatten med avsikt att energieffektivisera reningsprocessen. Resultatet tyder på att tillsats av biprodukter kan öka hastigheten vid syresättning av skogsindustriellt avloppsvatten och därmed minska energianvändningen vid den aeroba reningsprocessen. Vid tillsats av elfilteraska i processvattnet ökar hastigheten av syresättningen med 60 %. Det verkliga syrebehovet i dammen, SOTR sjönk från 314 ton O2/dygn till 118 ton O2/dygn. Energibehovet vid luftningsprocessen minskade med 100 MWh/dygn.

Data centers hosting internet-scale services consume megawatts of power. Mainly for cost reasons but also to appease environmental concerns, data center operators are interested to reduce their use of energy. This thesis investigates if and how hardware virtualization helps to improve the energy efficiency of modern cloud data centers. Our main motivation is to power off unused servers to save energy. The work encompasses three major parts: First, a simulation-driven analysis to quantify the benefits of known reservation times in infrastructure clouds. Virtual machines with similar expiration times are co-located to increase the probability to power down unused physical hosts. Second, we propose and prototyped a system to deliver truly on-demand cloud services. Idle virtual machines are suspended to free resources and as a first step to power off the physical server. Third, a novel block-level data synchronization tool enables fast and efficient state replication. Frequent state synchronization is necessary to prevent data unavailability: powering down a server disables access to the locally attached disks and any data stored on them. The techniques effectively reduce the overall number of required servers either through optimized scheduling or by suspending idle virtual machines. Fewer live servers translate into proportional energy savings, as the unused servers must no longer be powered.

L'architecture actuelle du cloud, reposant sur des datacenters centralisés, limite la qualité des services offerts par le cloud du fait de l'éloignement de ces datacenters par rapport aux utilisateurs. En effet, cette architecture est peu adaptée à la tendance actuelle promouvant l'ubiquité du cloud computing. De plus, la consommation énergétique actuelle des data centers, ainsi que du cœur de réseau, représente 3% de la production totale d'énergie, tandis que selon les dernières estimations, seulement 42,3% de la population serait connectée. Dans cette thèse, nous nous intéressons à deux inconvénients majeurs des clouds centralisés: la consommation d'énergie ainsi que la faible qualité de service offerte. D'une part, du fait de son architecture centralisée, le cœur de réseau consomme plus d'énergie afin de connecter les utilisateurs aux datacenters. D'autre part, la distance entre les utilisateurs et les datacenters entraîne une utilisation accrue du réseau mondial à large bande, menant à des expériences utilisateurs de faible qualité, particulièrement pour les applications interactives. Une approche semi-centralisée peut offrir une meilleur qualité d'expérience aux utilisateurs urbains dans des réseaux clouds mobiles. Pour ce faire, cette approche confine le traffic local au plus proche de l'utilisateur, tout en maintenant les caractéristiques centralisées s’exécutant sur les équipements réseaux et utilisateurs. Dans cette thèse, nous proposons une nouvelle architecture de cloud distribué, basée sur des "microclouds". Des "microclouds" sont créés de manière dynamique, afin que les ressources utilisateurs provenant de leurs ordinateurs, téléphones ou équipements réseaux puissent être mises à disposition dans le cloud. De ce fait, les microclouds offrent un système dynamique, passant à l'échelle, tout en évitant d’investir dans de nouvelles infrastructures. Nous proposons également un exemple d'utilisation des microclouds sur un cas typique réel. Par simulation, nous montrons que notre approche permet une économie d'énergie pouvant atteindre 75%, comparée à une approche centralisée standard. En outre, nos résultats indiquent que cette architecture passe à l'échelle en terme du nombre d'utilisateurs mobiles, tout en offrant une bien plus faible latence qu'une architecture centralisée. Pour finir, nous analysons comment inciter les utilisateurs à partager leur ressources dans les clouds mobiles et proposons un nouveau mécanisme d'enchère adapté à l'hétérogénéité et la forte dynamicité de ces systèmes. Nous comparons notre solution aux autres mécanismes d’enchère existants dans des cas d'utilisations typiques au sein des clouds mobiles, et montrons la pertinence de notre solution. / The current datacenter-centralized architecture limits the cloud to the location of the datacenters, generally far from the user. This architecture collides with the latest trend of ubiquity of Cloud computing. Also, current estimated energy usage of data centers and core networks adds up to 3% of the global energy production, while according to latest estimations only 42,3% of the population is connected. In the current work, we focused on two drawbacks of datacenter-centralized Clouds: Energy consumption and poor quality of service. On the one hand, due to its centralized nature, energy consumption in networks is affected by the centralized vision of the Cloud. That is, backbone networks increase their energy consumption in order to connect the clients to the datacenters. On the other hand, distance leads to increased utilization of the broadband Wide Area Network and poor user experience, especially for interactive applications. A distributed approach can provide a better Quality of Experience (QoE) in large urban populations in mobile cloud networks. To do so, the cloud should confine local traffic close to the user, running on the users and network devices. In this work, we propose a novel distributed cloud architecture based on microclouds. Microclouds are dynamically created and allow users to contribute resources from their computers, mobile and network devices to the cloud. This way, they provide a dynamic and scalable system without the need of an extra investment in infrastructure. We also provide a description of a realistic mobile cloud use case, and the adaptation of microclouds on it. Through simulations, we show an overall saving up to 75% of energy consumed in standard centralized clouds with our approach. Also, our results indicate that this architecture is scalable with the number of mobile devices and provide a significantly lower latency than regular datacenter-centralized approaches. Finally, we analyze the use of incentives for Mobile Clouds, and propose a new auction system adapted to the high dynamism and heterogeneity of these systems. We compare our solution to other existing auctions systems in a Mobile Cloud use case, and show the suitability of our solution.

Spatial planning can play an important role in the creation of a more sustianable devolopment, which means that climate and enviromental aspect are becoming more important. To be able to take into account aspects connected to these questions during the planningprocess, knowledge about which ones are important and how they can be implemented in the process are a key factor. Geographic information systems (GIS) is increasingly being used by planners because it is a time-efficient way to handle large amounts of geographic data of varying character. The large part of the worlds population lives in urban environments, and continues to increase,which means that the amount of land available for new buildings are limited. In order to best manage these limited landresources,analyzes of a variety of aspects should be weighed against each other and come to a conclusion about what is most appropriate for a specific area of land. With GIS and the Multicriteria Analysis (MCA) method, such analyzes can be made efficiently and contribute to the creation of more energy efficient spatial planning. In this study, which is part of a project initiated by Ovanåkers municipality, MCA was used to locate places suitable for either residential or industrial activities. This was done based on an energy efficiency perspective with a variety of criterias that are considered to contribute to reduced energy consumption. During interviews with planners at the municipality and the Swedish Energy Agency the criterias were ranked based on how important they were considered to be for analysis. These rankings formed the basis of the weight sets that were presented. The result shows that differences in the ranking affect which areas are considered appropriate to a certain extent. Despite these differences, there is a clear pattern where industries are considered most suitable on the outskirts of communities and housing more suitable in the central parts. / Samhällsplanering kan ha en avgörande roll på skapandet av en mer hållbar utveckling vilket gör att klimat- och miljöaspekter hamnar i allt större fokus. För att planarbetet ska kunna ta hänsyn till aspekter rörande dessa ämnen så krävs det kunskap om vilka aspekter som är viktiga samt hur de kan implementeras i planarbetet. Geografiska informationssystem (GIS) används i allt större utsträckning av samhällsplanerare eftersom det är ett tidseffektivt sätt att hantera stora mängder geografisk data av varierande karaktär. En allt större del av befolkningen bor i urbana miljöer, vilket gör att mark som är tillgänglig för exploatering minskar. För att på bästa sätt hushålla med dessa resurser bör analyser av en rad olika aspekter vägas mot varandra och på så sätt komma fram till vad som är mest lämpligt för ett specifikt markområde. Med GIS och metoden multikriterieanalys (MKA) kan analyser av detta slag göras på ett effektivt sätt och bidra till skapande av en mer energieffektiv samhällsplanering. I denna studie som är en del av ett projekt som initierats av Ovanåkers kommun användes MKA för att lokalisera platser lämpliga för antingen bostäder eller industriverksamhet. Detta gjordes utifrån ett energieffektiviseringperspektiv med en rad olika kriterier som anses bidra till minskad energikonsumtion. Med hjälp av intervjuer med planerare på kommunen och Energimyndigheten rangordnades kriterierna utifrån vilket betydelse de ansågs ha för analysens syfte. Dessa rangordningar låg till grund för de viktuppsättningar som togs fram. Resultatet visar att skillnader i rangordningen påverkar vilka områden som anses lämpliga i viss utsträckningen. Trots dessa skillnader finns ett tydligt mönster där industrier anses mest lämpliga i utkanten av samhällen och bostäder mer lämpliga i de centrala delarna.

Retrofitting the UK domestic built environment presents an excellent opportunity to improve its energy performance. However, retrofitting homes is a complex challenge conflated by multiple factors. Due to this complexity, a shortfall exists between the full potential and realised adoption of energy efficiency measures in the UK, a phenomenon termed the ‘Energy Efficiency Gap’. While a number of technical or economic factors may help explain this gap, difficult to quantify factors, such as social motivations, barriers, and viewpoints towards energy are also significant and often under-emphasised in public policy. As such, in order to improve the understanding of the Energy Efficiency Gap and the uptake of future retrofit initiatives, this research adopted a socio-technical approach that considered social and technical retrofit factors together. Specifically, this research collected data from interviews, questionnaires, and a Q Study in the cities of Manchester and Cardiff, alongside a questionnaire that measured energy efficiency technology and behaviour preferences. An original contribution to knowledge was using the data to empirically identify motivations and barriers to adopting energy efficient technologies, as well as identifying household viewpoints towards energy use and linking them to retrofit technology and energy efficiency behaviour preferences. As a result of this research, specific policy recommendations are presented to help promote energy efficiency retrofits in the UK. This research was carried out as part of the Engineering & Physical Science Research Council and Sustainable Urban Environment research programme, “Re-Engineering the City 2020-2050 Urban Foresight and Transition Management (RETROFIT 2050)”.

Ongoing modification and change is core to how domestic and built environments function. Thus occupants domestication and development of home heating practices around low-carbon technologies is likely to exceed what building engineering sciences have the ability to plan ahead for. Yet, environmental policies and low -carbon industry approaches to sustainable energy consumption are characterised by a high degree of technological determinism. Disciplinary approaches to sustainable energy consumption tend to separate home heating into stable, routine interaction with control points, environmental factors and socio-demographic drivers. Framing low-carbon technical change in isolation from domestic environments often leads to a gap between intended and actual use of technologies. By focusing on TRVs (thermostatic radiators valve) and radiators, this thesis takes an interdisciplinary turn to jointly examine the social and environmental elements of households energy use. A turn to sensory ethnography and practice-place relationships offers a way to better understand how people use energy for space heating in relation to the buildings they live in and how improvisatory uses of technologies emerge from flows of material, domestic, sensory and physical contingencies of the home. Combining home video tours with building energy monitoring in eight homes, the thesis demonstrates that home heating is a place-event of the home because heating systems and energy consumption are woven into the fabric of everyday life. Environmental elements show that the social and technical are inseparable in energy used for space heating and individual elements imply that the domestication of technologies is highly unpredictable. The thesis synthesises findings into a taxonomy table of irregular radiator and TRV use. On the one hand, irregularities indicate that improvisatory uses of technologies are productive sources of sustainable change because they can be potential sites for co-design. On the other hand, the interwoven character of the social and technical in households energy use critically challenges how environmental policy, low-carbon industry and disciplinary approaches frame intervention into sustainable energy consumption. The thesis argues for the value of logic of intervention and sustainable change that is collaborative, system-focused and gradually uncovers interrelationships.

The service and housing sector stands for 40 % of the total energy consumption in Sweden and extensive measures ought to be made to reduce this number. Measures have been ongoing in this this sector during a relatively long period with the objective in sight that the EU implemented for the year 2020. There is a great focus on technical development that is applied to new construction projects but the measures to improve the energy performance in existing buildings are also an important area for the real estate companies. The European Council has implemented directives that will drive the issue forward regarding energy consumption in the housing sector. Several studies indicate that energy efficiency in existing buildings can be made but there are split opinions regarding energy savings, profitability and what incentives encourage companies to make these investments  What underlying causes make companies want to invest in making existing buildings more energy efficient?What kinds of energy efficiencies are being made? Which factors may affect decisions regarding investments in energy efficiency? The purpose of this essay is to examine how real estate companies are undertaking energy efficiencies in existing building, how the process for these investments may look regarding what types of energy efficiencies that is being performed and what type of investment calculations that is being used.The essay is a qualitative study with exploratory purpose and has an abductive approach. The studies primary data has been gathered through interviews with respondents from 9 different real estate companies. The informants have different positions but a strong relation to energy efficiency. The study indicates that real estate companies have a great focus on performing energy efficiency in existing buildings in their property stock to reach internal environmental goals and because there is a profit to be made by lowering operating costs through energy savings. The buildings specific preconditions dictate to a large extent what type of energy efficiencies that are being performed but in most cases there must be a profitability in the investments for them to be made. In some cases, the energy efficiencies are not necessarily cost effective but they are presumed to make the real estate companies reach their environmental goals and for their business to be run in a sustainable way.

The thesis is devoted to assessing the effectiveness of subsidies spent on improving energy efficiency in the business sector. It analyzes the use of energy resources, international development in energy consumption and legislation focused on energy efficiency. Further, it analyzes two possibilities of obtaining funds for measures improving energy efficiency, subsidies and bank loans. There are given characteristics of the subsidy program Eco-Energy from the Operational program Enterprise and Innovation 2007 - 2013. In the practical part, the effectiveness of subsidies from this program is assessed by comparison of the supported and unsupported companies.