Best Paper Award at KICS ICTC 2026 in Jeju

NSLab is proud to celebrate a Best Paper Award at KICS ICTC 2026 in Jeju. Carlo Centofanti presented Adding Workloads for Free: Efficient CPU Operating Zones for Energy-Aware Cloud Consolidation, which received the Best Paper Award (Main Track) at the 17th International Conference on ICT Convergence, held on 14–16 October in Jeju Island, Korea, organized by KICS and technically co-sponsored by IEEE, IEEE ComSoc and IEICE.

Energy-aware orchestration usually assumes that adding work to a node always adds power. Measuring at the wall on a Kubernetes testbed, we show that on modern power-managed CPUs this is not true: waking an idle core is expensive, while adding work to a node already at its sustained power limit costs almost nothing, and can even lower power. These efficient operating zones let a scheduler consolidate workloads at near-zero marginal power, but they are invisible to the RAPL counters most energy-aware tools rely on.

The awarded paper is a joint effort between the University of L'Aquila (NSLab), NexTrainE and the Indian Institute of Technology Dharwad, with co-authors Carlo Centofanti, Leonardo D'Errico, Luigi Susanna, Koteswararao Kondepu, Fabio Graziosi and Andrea Marotta. It was partially supported by MAECI and India's DST through the MERITO project.

During the conference Carlo also presented Latency-Aware Edge-Cloud Deployment of Vision Foundation Models for Industrial IoT, where the Segment Anything Model (SAM) was deployed in a real IIoT digital printing workflow across edge, cloud and hybrid edge–cloud setups. SAM outperforms a supervised Mask R-CNN baseline in both accuracy and inference time, and in hybrid deployments network latency and locality can dominate the end-to-end response time, making the case for an edge-first strategy. Co-authored with Matteo Zenadocchio, Carmine Birra, Guido De Vincentiis, Augusto Rabuffo, Vincenzo Di Nino, Leonardo Mostarda and Andrea Marotta, this work was partially supported by Regione Abruzzo (PR FESR 2021–2027) and by NextGenerationEU (NRRP) through the VITALITY Innovation Ecosystem.

Two papers, two teams: congratulations to everyone involved.