These are example topics for Bachelor’s and Master’s theses. The concrete scope and methods are flexible and can be adapted to your interests and background. All projects combine practical software work with a clear focus on sustainability and energy efficiency in computing.
You are very welcome to bring your own ideas as well – I am always happy to discuss new project proposals.
The overarching goal of all topics and my work is to reduce the carbon emissions of modern digital infrastructure!
If you are interested or have questions, please feel free to contact me:
📧 geerd-dietger.hoffmann@uni-potsdam.de
To systematically optimize code for energy efficiency, we need large datasets of programs whose performance and energy usage are well understood. In this project, you will help to build such a dataset.
The core idea is to use locally hosted large language models (LLMs) to generate source code in specific programming languages for well-defined tasks. This code will then be:
Possible aspects of the thesis include:
This topic is well suited if you are interested in software engineering, programming languages, automation, and AI/LLMs, and would like to contribute to open research infrastructure for sustainable computing.
In practice, we often want to estimate the energy usage of a program on a machine we do not directly have access to. For example, this is important for intelligent load balancing, virtual machine placement, or capacity planning in data centers. Currently this is not possible!
The idea of this project is to use ProcPower to create energy models for multiple hardware platforms and then investigate how far measurements from one machine can be transferred or adapted to another.