Category: Conference

FONDA at SIGMOD

Mahdi Esmailoghli and Matthias Weidlich traveled to Bengaluru, India to participate in the SIGMOD 2026 conference. Mahdi presented his work on FlowPilot: A Suggestion System for Designing Scientific Workflows. FlowPilot extracts a variety of syntactic and semantic features from a corpus of existing scientific workflows to construct a similarity knowledge base. Using this knowledge base, FlowPilot can then suggest likely next steps to the user during workflow development.

FlowPilot outperforms state-of-the-art code-generating models such as Llama-4, and traditional methods, like association rule mining techniques on NextFlow workflows.

Introducing TCO2: Total CO2 Cost of Ownership

TCO2: Total CO2 Cost of Ownership is a tool for analyzing the carbon footprint of database server replacements. It was developed by the Data Engineering Systems group at the Hasso Platner Institute, including Tilmann Rabl (PI) and Ilin Tolovski (doctoral researcher) from FONDA subproject B6.  Ilin, Tilmann and Marcel Weisgut presented TCO2 at the 51st Conference on Very Large Databases (VLDB) on September 3rd. The tool provides a break-even analysis of server replacement, taking into consideration, among other factors, the embodied carbon of new hardware, the carbon intensity of a nation’s power supply, and the type of workload being run. Explore these relationships for yourself here!

Abstract: 

Data centers produce a significant and increasing amount of CO2 emissions. In the past, these have been predominantly due to energy generation for powering data centers. With the transition to energy sources with lower carbon production, the embodied carbon (i.e., CO2 and other greenhouse gas emissions during production, transport, and end-of-life) plays an increasing role when planning server lifecycles. While replacing an old server with newer hardware will typically reduce the power consumption of individual tasks, due to better efficiency of modern CPUs, offsetting the embodied carbon of new hardware can take months to tens of years, depending on the grid carbon intensity.

Read more here!