The energy impact of IT infrastructures is a significant resource issue for many organisations. The Natural Resources Defence Council estimates that US data centers alone consumed 91 billion kilowatt-hours of electrical energy in 2013 – enough to power the households of New York twice-over – and this is estimated to grow to 139 billion kilowatt-hours by 2020. However, this is an underestimation as this figure fails to take into account other countries and all other computer usage. There are calls for reducing computer energy consumption to bring it in line with the amount of work being performed – so-called energy proportional computing. In order to achieve this we need to understand both where the energy is being consumed within a system and how modifications to such systems will affect the functionality (such as QoS) and the energy consumption. Monitoring and changing a live system is often not a practical solution. There are cost implications in doing so, and it normally requires significant time in order to fully ascertain the long-term trends. There is also the risk that any changes could lead to detrimental impacts, either in terms of the functionality of the system or in the energy consumed. This can lead to a situation where it is considered too risky to perform anything other than the most minor tweaks to a system. The use of modelling and simulation provides an alternative approach to evaluating where energy is being consumed, and assessing the impact of changes to the system. It also offers the potential for much faster turn-around and feedback, along with the ability to evaluate the impact of many different options simultaneously.

ENERGY-SIM 2016 seeks original work that is focused on addressing new research and development challenges, developing new techniques, and providing case studies, related to energy-aware simulation and modelling.