Professor Doug Angus of the Telfer School of Management played a role in identifying opportunities to improve the effectiveness and efficiency of Ontario’s immunization system in preventing disease as a member of the Advisory Committee for Ontario’s Immunization System Review.

The final report of the advisory committee was formally released this week. Professor Angus served on the committee during 2012-2013.

The Ministry of Health and Long-Term Care is developing a five-year Immunization Program Renewal action plan informed by the report findings.   

The steep challenges of heading projects in Africa – an issue that stirs passionate debate among academics and practitioners – are examined in a special issue [This link is no longer available] of the Journal of African Business. This compilation of new empirical and descriptive articles on the practice of project management in Africa, peer-reviewed and reflecting a variety of perspectives, was edited by Professors Lavagnon Ika of the Telfer School of Management and Jan Saint-Macary of the Université du Québec.  The content, with an editorial by professors Ika and Saint-Macary, is available online [This link is no longer available].

We must reign in the soaring energy costs and carbon footprint associated with datacentres, says David Wright, a professor at the Telfer School of Management. He has called these hubs of computing power “the smokestack industry of the 21^st Century.” And they’re becoming even bigger electricity guzzlers with the proliferation of big data.

But if datacentre managers could automatically determine when and where to carry out data processing activities, it would significantly reduce electricity costs and carbon emissions. That is the vision presented by Professor Wright and his co-author in a new study that looks at how electricity costs and carbon footprint can be reduced by scheduling of workloads in datacentres.

Using information from 5 of these datacentres, located in California, Alberta and Ontario, the study simulated job scheduling and revealed important cost savings and environmental benefits.

Demonstrating this potential for innovation in datacentres is significant at a time when Canada’s two largest provinces have agreed to a climate-change deal and Ontario has signalled the importance of putting a value on carbon.

Project description

Growth of cloud computing stimulates the demand for data centres, causing energy costs and associated carbon emissions to rise. Controlling electric power use in datacentres can happen in two ways. One is developing standards for monitoring and controlling energy use. A further reduction can be achieved by combining energy efficiency measures with workload scheduling policies that allocate jobs to datacentres that have low dollar and/or carbon costs, Trung Le and David Wright report in their study in Sustainable Computing: Informatics and Systems (in press).

The paper develops such an optimization model and demonstrates it on data from California, Alberta and Ontario in order to quantify empirically the extent of the dollar and environmental benefits that can be obtained.

Valuable Canadian experience

The electronics of datacentres draw huge amounts of electricity, not to mention the air conditioning needed to prevent them from overheating. There are calculations showing that, internationally, spending on datacentre power and cooling exceeds $30 billion, comparable to spending on new server hardware. According to one forecast, datacentre carbon footprint from purchased electric power will reach the equivalent of 260 million metric tonnes of CO₂ by 2020.

Canada has developed valuable expertise in this area – advanced research led to the introduction of the world’s first standard on greenhouse gas reduction at data centres, from the Canadian Standards Association – and there are good prospects for continuing this leadership.

“Datacentres are an emerging business opportunity for Canada, with its low cost and sustainable energy sources,” Wright explains. “Additional cost savings compared to more southerly locations can be achieved by using outdoor air for cooling during the winter.”

Professor Samir Saadi of the Telfer School recently returned from the Southern Finance Association (SFA) annual meeting in Florida where he was an invited panelist on investment risk management. Each of the panelists had contributed to a new book, Investment Risk Management, to be published by Oxford University Press.

Professor Saadi also presented two papers, titled “Does Change in Housing Wealth Influence Cost of Capital?” and “Can National Culture Explain IPO Underpricing?”