Lightnews — Scholar-powered news

Lauritz Thamsen @lauritzthamsen.org · Aug 15

... and I am already looking forward to our next outing! Hopefully, then also with Max MacDonald (who is starting his PhD in October), Matthew Waters (who is another MSci student working with us), and Vasilis Bountris (who is planning to visit us from HU Berlin)!

@uofgcompsci.bsky.social 🏰 🖥️ 🎓

Lauritz Thamsen @lauritzthamsen.org · Aug 15

Joining me this time were Kathleen West, James Nurdin, Youssef Moawad, Giulio Attenni, and Magnus Reid.

I am very lucky to get to work with such a bright and friendly group of young researchers at Glasgow! 😊

1 1

Lauritz Thamsen @lauritzthamsen.org · Aug 15

I believe that research works best as a team sport, with all the obvious benefits, and think that teams work best when there are chances to get to know each other away from the desks from time to time. For example, when there is a tricky flat tire to fix together midway through a bike trip... 🚲 🌬️ 🔧

1

Lauritz Thamsen @lauritzthamsen.org · Aug 15

We had a fantastic away day as the Carbon-Conscious Computing lab (lauritzthamsen.org/lab/) of the University of Glasgow last week! 💻 ☁️ 🌱 In keeping with our mission, we took our bikes out for a ride around the Isle of Bute! 🚉 ⛴️ 🌊

1 1 3

Reposted by Lauritz Thamsen

Martin Kleppmann @martin.kleppmann.com · Aug 9

If you speak two languages well, have you tried counting to 10 in alternating languages? I found it surprisingly mind-bending.

23 11 120

Lauritz Thamsen @lauritzthamsen.org · Jul 24

Many thanks to Chris Anagnostopoulos for the kind invitation to attend and to the whole organizing team and many volunteers for the fantastic conference in Glasgow! 🙏

Always so good to meet colleagues in person – some for the first time, some again after a while! 😊

The general co-chairs of ICDCS 2025, Christos (Chris) Anagnostopoulos and Iadh Ounis, opening the main conference on Monday morning

1

Lauritz Thamsen @lauritzthamsen.org · Jul 24

I had a great time at IEEE #ICDCS 2025. First time that I attended a conference without a talk or helping to organize, so this was a new experience! Of course, also rather nice to attend a top conference after 10 minutes on public transport (and after dropping off the wee one at nursery too ☺️)

Having a good time with Drs Reza Farahani, Lauri Lovén, Ilir Murturi, and Paul Harvey ahead of the banquet dinner

Dr Blesson Varghese explaining how ML can be made feasible on small edge devices in his workshop keynote

Scottish treats in the coffee breaks – Tunnock's Tea Cakes and shortbread too!

As a vegetarian i was "in safe hands" at ICDCS, as this card says, identifying me as "vegi" :)

1 5

Reposted by Lauritz Thamsen

Programming for the Planet @propl.dev · Jun 30

Due to the world being a little unpredictable right now, we've extended the submission deadline for PROPL by a few days, so it's now 8th July 2025 AoE! conf.researchr.org/home/icfp-sp...

3 4

Lauritz Thamsen @lauritzthamsen.org · May 30

Very happy to share that I won the Early-Career #Teaching Excellence #Award of the College of Science and Engineering at the University of Glasgow! ☺️👨‍🏫🏰🎓✨

Longer post: www.linkedin.com/posts/laurit...

@uofgcompsci.bsky.social @uofglasgow.bsky.social

I am delighted to share that I won the Early-Career Teaching Excellence… | Lauritz Thamsen

I am delighted to share that I won the Early-Career Teaching Excellence Award of the College of Science and Engineering at the University of Glasgow! 👨‍🏫🏰🎓✨ As an academic who cares about teaching ju...

www.linkedin.com

1 14

Reposted by Lauritz Thamsen

Alec Stapp @alecstapp.bsky.social · May 23

Not sure how many people realize that battery storage already supplies 30% of California’s electricity demand at peak.

Batteries aren’t the future — they’re here now.

17 220 810

Lauritz Thamsen @lauritzthamsen.org · May 16

4: Kathleen will be presenting a short paper on Carbon-Aware Workflow Execution, arxiv.org/abs/2503.13705. This will be Kathleen's first talk at a conference and we are actively working on extending our results in the EPSRC-funded project Casper, so you are most welcome to provide helpful feedback!

Exploring the Potential of Carbon-Aware Execution for Scientific Workflows

Scientific workflows are widely used to automate scientific data analysis and often involve processing large quantities of data on compute clusters. As such, their execution tends to be long-running a...

arxiv.org

1 2

Lauritz Thamsen @lauritzthamsen.org · May 16

3: Fabian will be talking about WOW, arxiv.org/abs/2503.13072, which was accepted as a full paper too – and this one was in the works for a while, with Fabian driving the extensive experimental effort and managing the collaboration between five universities in context of the DFG-funded CRC FONDA!

WOW: Workflow-Aware Data Movement and Task Scheduling for Dynamic Scientific Workflows

Scientific workflows process extensive data sets over clusters of independent nodes, which requires a complex stack of infrastructure components, especially a resource manager (RM) for task-to-node as...

arxiv.org

1 1

Lauritz Thamsen @lauritzthamsen.org · May 16

2: Jonathan will summarize the full paper Flora, arxiv.org/abs/2502.21046. This is an outcome of our DFG-funded research project C5, demonstrating a low-overhead approach to cost-optimizing cloud cluster configurations for big data analytics, evaluated experimentally with 180 Spark application runs!

Flora: Efficient Cloud Resource Selection for Big Data Processing via Job Classification

Distributed dataflow systems like Spark and Flink enable data-parallel processing of large datasets on clusters of cloud resources. Yet, selecting appropriate computational resources for dataflow jobs...

arxiv.org

1

Lauritz Thamsen @lauritzthamsen.org · May 16

1/4: If you are at #IEEE #CCGrid 2025 in #Tromsø next week, catch Jonathan, Fabian, and Kathleen (@westkath.bsky.social) presenting joint work! 📰🧵👇

#CCGrid #distributed #sustainable #cloud #computing #research #Spark #Nextflow

A slide listing our three contributions to the 25th IEEE International Symposium on Cluster, Cloud and Internet Computing (CCGrid 2025):

- Wednesday, 21 May, 11 am (SSP2 session on Software Systems and Platforms – Cloud Continuum): Flora: Efficient Cloud Resource Selection for Big Data Processing via Job Classification (full paper)

- Thursday, 22 May, 2 pm (SSP5 session on Software Systems and Platforms – Workflows and Workloads): WOW: Workflow-Aware Data Movement and Task Scheduling for Dynamic Scientific Workflows (full paper)

- Wednesday, 21 May, 11 am (SIT2 session on Sustainable IT Systems): Exploring the Potential of Carbon-Aware Execution for Scientific Workflows (short paper)

1 1 4

Reposted by Lauritz Thamsen

Gavin Schmidt @climateofgavin.bsky.social · May 10

Apparently some folks are still confused about how much CO2 in the air has grown due to human activities. It's increased by more than 50%, which means over one third of all CO2 in the air is due to us.

Graph showing clearly that CO2 levels in the atmosphere was flat for thousands of years before the industrial revolution and have now increased by 50% (to over 420 ppm). Over one third of the CO2 in the air is from human activity.

23 230 580

Reposted by Lauritz Thamsen

Sam Tobin-Hochstadt @samth.bsky.social · May 8

2. The biggest problem is that AI is now good at the introductory problems, across every discipline. But introductory problems are necessary for learning.

1 2 11

Reposted by Lauritz Thamsen

Lauritz Thamsen @lauritzthamsen.org · Apr 16

Following the 1st International Workshop on Low Carbon Computing (LOCO), we are now calling for bids to organize the 2nd LOCO workshop! 💻 🔬 🌱

Bids due: 13 May (AoE)

Notifications by: 4 June

Full call details: sicsa.ac.uk/loco/loco202...

#lowcarbon #sustainable #green #computing #research

LOCO2024 - SICSA

SICSA - Scottish Informatics and Computer Science Alliance

sicsa.ac.uk

3 9

Lauritz Thamsen @lauritzthamsen.org · Apr 17

There's also an ad/cookie-free mirror kindly hosted by the Energy & Environment Group of Cambridge's Computer Laboratory, watch.eeg.cl.cam.ac.uk/c/loco/, thanks to @anil.recoil.org 🙏

International Workshop on Low Carbon Computing

Channel for International Workshop on Low Carbon Computing, mirror of https://www.youtube.com/@loco-workshop

watch.eeg.cl.cam.ac.uk

1 3

Lauritz Thamsen @lauritzthamsen.org · Apr 17

The 11 lightning talks were recorded as well of course: youtu.be/Wlus5KHbBDY ⚡💬

LOCO-2024 Lightning Talks

YouTube video by International Workshop on Low Carbon Computing

youtu.be

1

Lauritz Thamsen @lauritzthamsen.org · Apr 17

... and the #keynote #discussion we had with Strategically Green's fantastic @annecurrie.bsky.social: youtu.be/_nLrbIAng8o

LOCO-2024. Keynote discussion with Anne Currie. Strategically Green, UK

YouTube video by International Workshop on Low Carbon Computing

youtu.be

1 2 2

Lauritz Thamsen @lauritzthamsen.org · Apr 17

Let me also highlight the academic #keynote on "AI's Energy Challenge: Can Data Center-Power Grid Coordination Offer a Path to Sustainability?" by Boston University's Ayse Coskun: youtu.be/ClBSFDaqDrM

LOCO-2024. Keynote talk by Ayse Coskun. Boston University, USA

YouTube video by International Workshop on Low Carbon Computing

youtu.be

1 1 1

Lauritz Thamsen @lauritzthamsen.org · Apr 17

The talk recordings from #LOCO2024 are online now: www.youtube.com/@loco-workshop 💻🔬🌱

There are 19 talks across 7 sessions covering energy efficiency, carbon awareness, frugal computing, sustainable software engineering, and the related fields of computing for climate science & energy informatics!

International Workshop on Low Carbon Computing

Video Channel for International Workshop on Low Carbon Computing

www.youtube.com

1 1 2

Lauritz Thamsen @lauritzthamsen.org · Apr 17

Plus Ayse Coskun's LOCO 2024 keynote on the question "Can Data Center-Power Grid Coordination Offer a Path to Sustainability?"
watch.eeg.cl.cam.ac.uk/w/szVBBfJvdP...

LOCO-2024. Keynote talk by Ayse Coskun. Boston University, USA

Keynote talk by Ayse Coskun. Boston University, USA. (Session chair: Philipp Wiesner) 1st International Workshop on Low Carbon Computing. A hybrid event hosted in Glasgow, Scotland, UK, 3 December...

watch.eeg.cl.cam.ac.uk

1

Lauritz Thamsen @lauritzthamsen.org · Apr 16

Following the 1st International Workshop on Low Carbon Computing (LOCO), we are now calling for bids to organize the 2nd LOCO workshop! 💻 🔬 🌱

Bids due: 13 May (AoE)

Notifications by: 4 June

Full call details: sicsa.ac.uk/loco/loco202...

#lowcarbon #sustainable #green #computing #research

LOCO2024 - SICSA

SICSA - Scottish Informatics and Computer Science Alliance

sicsa.ac.uk

3 9

Reposted by Lauritz Thamsen

Joseph Rezek @rezekjoe.bsky.social · Apr 15

Why even have a brain, any ideas, any ability to express them, any kind of communication with other people, any desire to solve problems or invent anything, any reason to learn, any use for your eyes or your heart, or any reason to teach or create

From NYT article about the increasing use of AI in the classroom: “Writing is one of the most challenging tasks for students, which is why it is so tempting for some to ask A.I. to do it for them. In turn, A.I. can be useful for teachers who would like to assign more writing, but are limited in their time to grade it.”

100 1.5K 5.9K