Abstract Fueled by burgeoning online services, power and thermal issues are becoming a substantial issue in terms of cost and environmental impact both on the server (or data center) side and client side. In this talk, we shall motivate an approach that puts energy, power, thermal and sustainability issues at the heart of distributed computing, and strives to dynamically optimize energy consumption based on demands and supply limitations. The talk shall lay out significant challenges in realizing the vision and show some results on how a coordinated power management at multiple levels can help in a graceful QoS degradation in order to adapt to the given energy budgets. Speaker Bio Dr. Krishna Kant is currently a visiting research professor at Center for Secure Information Systems at George Mason University, and also serving as a program director in the CISE/CNS division of the National Science Foundation. His current areas of research include power/thermal issues in data centers, robustness in the domain name service, and cloud computing security. He received his Ph.D. degree in Computer Science from University of Texas at Dallas in 1981 and has since held several positions in academia and industry.