Exactum rooftop greenhouse experiment grows herbs

A greenhouse has been built on the roof of Exactum in a collaboration by the Department of Computer Science and the Fifth Dimension science project. To begin with, sedum grass is growing on the roof and tomatoes, courgettes and chilli in the greenhouse. The greenhouse is 9.4 square metres large.

The motivation for the computer scientists is the estimation that 2% of the greenhouse gas emissions caused by humans are emitted by equipment using information technology. This is more than e.g. air traffic produces globally. To the scientists, this is reason enough to look into how to decrease the impact of information technology on global warming.

The facilities of the rooftop greenhouse were finished in 2011, and in the spring, the success of different utility plants has been tested. The scientists were driven by the idea that the greenhouse could be maintained with the excess heat from the servers.

Now, crops like tomatoes, rosemary, courgettes and various kinds of chilli are grown in Kumpula. A similar project is carried out in Paul Brenner’s Green Cloud super-computer project at the University of Notre Dame in Indiana, USA.

Scientists have been up on the Exactum roof before. Before the greenhouse was installed, they were testing the cold resistance of computers in tents in winter. Some of the same servers are still outside after surviving for three winters. So far, the only problems have been observed with one type of fan. The majority of the computers have been able to survive the long-term outdoor cooling perfectly well. The results are very encouraging, since the cooling of the data centres stands for 20-40% of their power consumption, sometimes even more in older data centres.

The greenhouse on the roof is surrounded by an experimental green belt. It is a part of the Fifth Dimension project and World Design Capital Helsinki 2012. The purpose of the green belt is to discover the best solution for roof gardens in Finland.

Professor Jussi Kangasharju and researcher Mikko Pervilä are the Computer Science Department members of the project Heating up the fifth dimension.

See how the plants grow and the research progresses >>

Text: Minna Meriläinen-Tenhu
Photo: Mikko Pervilä
Translation: Marina Kurtén
 

Created date

14.08.2012 - 16:44

The university’s team Game of Nolife won Western European programming contest for students

In the finals in Thailand in spring 2016, the students from the University of Helsinki will face the best teams in the world.

The University of Helsinki has won the inter-university NWERC 2015 programming contest that was held in Linköping recently. It was attended by 95 teams from Western Europe. The Game of Nolife team from the University of Helsinki consisted of computer-science and maths students Tuukka Korhonen, Olli Hirviniemi and Otte Heinävaara.

The Carat research team has published a dataset focusing on collaborative energy diagnostics of mobile devices and applications

 

 

The Carat research team from University of Helsinki publishes a dataset from the Carat project (http://carat.cs.helsinki.fi/) focusing on collaborative energy diagnostics of mobile devices and applications. The dataset was presented at the IEEE PerCom’15 conference last spring in the publication "Energy Modeling of System Settings: A Crowdsourced Approach" that won the Marc Weiser Best Paper Award given at the conference.

Eemil Lagerspetz was awarded a grant by the Jorma Ollila fund of Nokia Foundation on November 24, 2015

 

 
 
Eemil Lagerspetz was awarded a grant by the Jorma Ollila fund of Nokia Foundation on November 24, 2015. Congratulations!
 
The fund was launched in year 2014 to support post doctoral research career development. 
The title of Eemil’s post doctoral research is “Mind The Gap: Combining Trajectory Datasets for a Holistic Picture of Human Mobility” and the research will be carried out at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST) in 2016.
 

Collaborative Networking (CoNe) group researchers got the best paper award at 2nd ACM Conference on Information-Centric Networking (ICN 2015)

 

Collaborative Networking (CoNe) group researchers got the best paper award at 2nd ACM Conference on Information-Centric Networking (ICN 2015), one of the most prestigious venues for ICN research. The article entitled Pro-Diluvian: Understanding Scoped-Flooding for Content Discovery in ICN is lead by Liang Wang - a recent PhD graduate from CoNe research group, and is the outcome of collaboration with Suzan Bayhan and Jussi Kangasharju from UH, Jörg Ott from Aalto University, Arjuna Sathiaseelan and Jon Crowcroft from Cambridge University.