Lab Overview

David Irwin directs the Sustainable Computing Lab at UMass Amherst, which focuses on designing distributed software systems with an emphasis on improving efficiency and sustainability.  We focus on two primary areas: 1) improving the efficiency of large-scale computer systems, particularly data center, cloud, and edge platforms, and 2) improving the efficiency of large-scale cyber-physical systems, including electricity, building, and transportation systems.  We design, implement, deploy, and analyze prototypes of these systems at scale to make them work better, publicly release our code and data, and publish research papers on our results at top-tier conferences and journals in computer systems. Our research is deeply interdisciplinary and structured "horizontally" across a wide range of applications in efficiency and sustainability that span many technical "verticals," including distributed systems and networking, operating systems and virtualization, security and privacy, applied data science and machine learning, sensor networks and the Internet-of-Things, economics and operations research, and clean energy systems. A more detailed research overview is available here.  Our work has been generously supported by the National Science Foundation, the state of Massachusetts, VMware, Intel, Google, and Amazon. 

Ultimately, the lab's goals are to both design innovative computer systems that make the world a better place, and develop the next generation of computer systems researchers and practitioners. Our Ph.D. and M.S. graduates have gone on to take tenure-track faculty positions in academia, found technology startups, work as software engineers and data scientists at leading technology companies, and pursue Ph.D's.