In Malaysia, women make up between 50 and 60 percent of the computer industry’s employees and many of them hold management positions. Computing and programming are considered “women-friendly” professions because men do not see indoor work as masculine and much of Malaysian society stigmatizes women who work outdoors as lower class. “In the U.S., technology and masculinity are very connected, which is not the case in Malaysia,” says Lulea University of Technology professor Ulf Mellstrom. Women initially left their villages to seek jobs in the electronics industry. Those jobs were replaced with technological jobs, which enabled newly educated women to assume positions of authority. Mellstrom says the transition was facilitated for women in computer science by role models from the electronics industry. He says the critical mass of women in the computer sciences has created “a symbolic space” that continues to provide new role models for other women.

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University of Michigan (UM) researchers are developing near-threshold computing (NTC) technology, which could allow electronic devices to operate at lower voltages than normal. The researchers say that NTC could enable future computer systems to reduce energy requirements by 100 times or more. NTC allows for advanced scaling of complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor (CMOS) devices, while improving energy efficiency. “The major impact of the work is that, for a fixed battery lifetime, significantly more transistors can be used, allowing for greater functionality,” says UM professor Ronald Dreslinksi. NTC also could help decrease power requirements without overturning the entire CMOS framework. Operating at near-threshold voltages could allow devices to require less energy while minimizing energy leakage. The researchers say that NTC could have nearly universal applications in data centers and personal computing. NTC also could be useful in sensor-based systems. By reducing the power requirements by up to 100 times in sensors, NTC could lead to future sensor designs.

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Binghamton University (BU) researchers are studying a holistic approach to data centers that could make them much less costly to operate and significantly reduce the carbon footprint for information technology. “The amount of energy we spend running our data centers in the U.S. is about 2.5 percent of the total national energy expenditure,” says BU professor Kanad Ghose. Meanwhile, the number of data centers is growing because of increasing demand for online services. Ghose says that most data centers only run at 40 to 60 percent of their maximum capacity. Cooling the data centers also requires a lot of energy. Ghose and BU professor Bahgat Sammakia are developing ways to spread the workload across all the machines in a network, planning in advance for the workload allocation and the cooling budget. The researchers are planning to set up an experimental data center to improve energy efficiency. Ghose wants to achieve an energy reduction of about 15 percent, which could translate into savings of more than 25 percent.

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