Digital Commons Network^™

A Multicriteria Based Quantitative Framework For Assessing Sustainability Of Pile Foundations, Aditi Misra

Master's Theses

ABSTRACT

Civil Engineering is the major instrument of anthropocentric development over centuries through ever expanding infrastructure, cities and facilities. Civil engineering processes are both resource and fuel intensive. The building industry alone, during the construction stage, uses about 30-40% of the total resources used in the industrialized countries. There is a growing consensus that delivering a sustainable built environment starts with incorporating sustainability thoughts at the planning and design stages of a project. Geotechnical engineering is most resource intensive although this intensive consumption of energy goes unnoticed mainly because of the indirect nature of the energy used in the …

Reducing Cluster Power Consumption By Dynamically Suspending Idle Nodes, Brian Michael Oppenheim

Master's Theses

Close to 1% of the world's electricity is consumed by computer servers. Given that the increased use of electricity raises costs and damages the environment, optimizing the world's computing infrastructure for power consumption is worthwhile. This thesis is one attempt at such an optimization. In particular, I began by building a cluster of 6 Intel Atom based low-power nodes to perform work analogous to data center clusters. Then, I installed a version of Hadoop modified with a novel power management system on the cluster. The power management system uses different algorithms to determine when to turn off idle nodes in …

Planet Building: A Case Study Of Corporate Sustainability For A Globalized World, Darci L. Arnold

Master's Theses

With the increasing complexities of a globalized 21st-century world, the growing power of industry clusters makes corporations important actors in designing sustainable development strategies. This thesis presents an applied case study at CB Richard Ellis (CBRE) as the company designed and launched its award-winning Sensible Sustainability platform. The research was conducted to determine how a large multinational company could create a business case for sustainability, and the results illustrate that value exists for firms engaged in sustainability initiatives.

CBRE's initial no-cost and low-cost activities resulted in increased operational efficiencies and lower costs. Over the course of the research period, the …