Sustainable Computing: Informatics and Systems

About Sustainable Computing: Informatics and Systems

Sustainable Computing: Informatics and Systems — Full Journal Profile

Sustainable Computing: Informatics and Systems is an international, peer-reviewed journal published by Elsevier, devoted to the energy, power, thermal and environmental dimensions of computing, and to the use of computing to support ecological and societal sustainability. Its short name in publisher material is SUSCOM. The print ISSN is 2210-5379 and the second ISSN carried in the Journals World record for this title is 2210-5387. The journal's full title in Elsevier and ScienceDirect material includes a colon, Sustainable Computing: Informatics and Systems, while the Journals World post title omits the colon. That punctuation difference does not indicate a different journal: the ISSN, the publisher and the subject identity all match.

A note on identity is needed at the start of this profile because this Journals World record carries the slug ending in “-2”. A second Journals World post exists under the base slug for the same title, post 10808, with the same title and the same print ISSN, 2210-5379, in its record. That twin post was checked directly through the site's REST service during the preparation of this profile, twice with the same result: it was a thin record of 272 words with no depth marker, not a completed profile. This post, 368205, is therefore profiled here in the normal way, and the pair is flagged in the batch report as a confirmed duplicate candidate, with both posts thin at the time of checking, for the site's duplicate handling process. Nothing in this profile depends on that internal site matter; the journal described below is the single Elsevier journal identified by ISSN 2210-5379.

Launch and history

Elsevier announced the launch of the journal in February 2011, presenting it as a new title for research on energy-aware and thermal-aware management of computing resources, together with computing applications that carry ecological and societal effects. The launch announcement named the founding editorial leadership: Ishfaq Ahmad, Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Texas at Arlington, as editor-in-chief, and Behrooz A. Shirazi, of Washington State University, as special issues editor. It also carried an endorsement from Jack Dongarra of the University of Tennessee, who framed power-aware computing as a first-class research issue. Those launch details are given here as history. Editorial roles in a journal of this size change over a run of more than a decade, and the current holder of any editorial office is not publicly disclosed in the sources used for this profile in a form that could be stated safely, so authors should consult the editorial board page linked from the journal's ScienceDirect home for the present team.

The timing of the launch is significant for understanding the journal's agenda. By 2011, data-centre energy use, mobile device battery limits, heat dissipation in high-performance computing and the carbon footprint of information technology had moved from facilities concerns to research problems in algorithms, architecture, operating systems and software engineering. A dedicated journal gave those problems a home that was not a side track of a general computer science title. Coverage listings for the journal begin in 2011, consistent with the launch, and its subsequent growth in citations, reflected in the h-index of 63 reported in the Journals World record when that record was compiled, shows that the field consolidated quickly around a small number of specialist outlets, of which this is one.

Publisher and platform

The publisher is Elsevier. International listings vary in the corporate form they print, Elsevier BV or Elsevier Inc., and in the country they attach to the imprint, the Netherlands or the United States; the Journals World record gives Elsevier BV and the Netherlands, while some ranking services give Elsevier Inc. and the United States. Those variations reflect Elsevier's multinational structure and the office that a given directory associates with the title, not competing publishers. The journal's home for readers and authors is ScienceDirect, Elsevier's platform, where the title page carries its aims and scope, its issue archive, article pages with digital object identifiers, and links to the editorial board and to the submission system. Elsevier's shop page for the title uses ISSN 2210-5379 as the subscription identifier, confirming the print ISSN given above.

Submission is through Editorial Manager, the manuscript system whose address for this journal is given at the end of the ScienceDirect aims and scope page. Authors should enter through the ScienceDirect title page rather than through a link in a third-party call for papers, because special-issue calls for this journal circulate widely and the genuine route is the one the publisher itself links.

Aims and scope, in the publisher's structure

Elsevier describes sustainable computing as a rapidly expanding research area spanning computer science and engineering, electrical engineering and other engineering disciplines. The journal's aim, paraphrased from the publisher, is to publish research on the energy-aware and thermal-aware management of computing resources, and, equally, research on applications of computing that can have ecological and societal impact. It publishes original research papers and survey articles on power, energy, temperature and environment topics of current importance, and it states that papers are competitively evaluated through peer review by an editorial board drawn from prominent researchers internationally. The publisher organises the detailed scope into clusters, which are summarised here in original wording.

Making computing sustainable: software systems

The first cluster looks at sustainability from the software side. It includes power-aware software, code profiling and transformation for power management, power-aware middleware, multimedia systems, and scheduling and allocation. The unifying question is how decisions taken in code, in a runtime or in a scheduler change the energy a computation consumes, and whether that saving can be achieved without an unacceptable loss of performance or quality of service.

Computing for sustainability

The second cluster reverses the direction: using computing to make the wider world more sustainable. Named examples in the publisher's scope include using sensors for environmental monitoring, smart control for environmentally friendly buildings, and green data centres and enterprise computing. Papers here are judged both as computing contributions and by the credibility of the environmental application, so an author needs to show a real sensing, control or management advance and a plausible connection to an ecological or societal outcome.

Re-inventing algorithms and applications

The third cluster concerns the theory and redesign of algorithms and applications for sustainability. It covers theoretical aspects of energy, power and temperature, power-aware applications, resource management that optimises performance and power together, the power implications of portable and mobile computing, and algorithms that reduce power, energy and heat in high-performance computing. This is the cluster where a purely algorithmic paper belongs, provided its energy model is explicit and its claims are tested rather than asserted.

Modelling and evaluation of sustainable systems

The fourth cluster is methodological. It includes the reliability of power-aware computers, runtime systems that assist in power saving, models for the collective optimisation of power and performance, and monitoring tools for the power and performance of parallel and distributed systems. Work in this cluster supplies the measurement practice the rest of the field depends on: without trustworthy models and monitoring, an energy saving claimed in one paper cannot be compared with a saving claimed in another.

Sustainable hardware platforms and devices

The fifth cluster is the hardware and architecture perspective. The publisher lists power-aware networking, real-time systems, power-efficient architectures, efficient circuit design for energy harvesting, power management in memory, disk, storage and other peripheral devices, configurable and renewable energy, low-power electronics, embedded systems, application-specific integrated circuits and field-programmable gate arrays, and power leakage and dissipation. The Journals World record's subject summary for the title points in the same direction, naming energy efficiency in computing, cloud computing and resource management, parallel computing and optimisation, the internet of things and edge and fog computing, green information technology and sustainability, smart grid energy management, energy-efficient wireless sensor networks, and distributed and parallel computing systems.

Frequency and article character

International listings give the journal a frequency of four issues a year. Its article character follows from its scope: full research papers that present a system, algorithm, architecture or model with experimental or analytical evaluation, and survey articles that organise a fast-moving sub-field. Special issues, a format the journal built into its editorial structure from launch with a dedicated special issues editor, gather papers around a theme or a conference community. Authors considering a special-issue submission should check the specific call on the publisher's site, because deadlines, guest editors and topic boundaries for a special issue override the general guidance for regular submissions.

A typical strong paper in this journal makes its energy claim auditable. It states the platform and workload on which measurements were taken or the assumptions of the model used, reports performance alongside energy so that a saving bought by an unacceptable slowdown is visible, compares against a relevant baseline rather than against an unoptimised straw case, and discusses the limits of the result, including whether it should transfer to other hardware or scales. Papers that report only a percentage saving, with no platform, workload or baseline that another group could reproduce, are weak by the standards the journal's scope implies, whatever their topic.

Indexing, ranking and metrics

Ranking services based on Scopus data list this journal in the first quartile, Q1, in its categories. SCImago-based listings associate it with Computer Science (miscellaneous) and Electrical and Electronic Engineering, both at Q1 in the summaries consulted, with a SCImago Journal Rank a little above 1.0 in recent listings. The Journals World record reported an h-index of 63 at the time of compilation; other Scopus-based services have printed values in the fifties and sixties depending on their update date. The exact figure for any metric therefore depends on the database and the year, and none should be quoted without naming its source and date. What can be said without that qualification is that, by the standards of its specialist field, this is an established and highly cited journal rather than a marginal outlet: a Q1 position in Scopus-based ranking, a four-figure total citation presence in the record's works and citations summary, and a continuous run since 2011 together support that assessment.

Readers should use metrics for the limited purposes they serve. A Q1 label helps a librarian or an author compare journals inside the same category in the same year. It does not certify that any individual article is sound, and it does not make the journal the right home for a paper outside its scope. Fit to the energy, thermal and sustainability agenda described above remains the first test for this title.

Access model

The journal is published by Elsevier on ScienceDirect under that publisher's standard arrangements for a subscription journal with author open-access options. Individual article access therefore varies: some articles are open access and free to read, others require a subscription or a purchase, and the status is shown on each article's ScienceDirect page. This profile states the position in that general form deliberately. Specific article processing charges, subscription prices and any current transformative agreement coverage for an author's institution change over time and are not publicly disclosed in the sources used here in a stable form; authors for whom cost is decisive should check the journal's page on the Elsevier site and their own library's agreements before submitting, and should not rely on a fee figure quoted by an unrelated directory.

Guidance for prospective authors

Before submitting, test a manuscript against the journal's own structure. Which of the publisher's clusters does the paper belong to, and can that be said in one sentence? Is the contribution about making computing itself sustainable, or about computing applied to a sustainability problem, and does the evaluation match that claim? Are energy, power or temperature measured or modelled explicitly, as the scope requires, rather than invoked as motivation and then forgotten? Those three questions will place most manuscripts accurately, including manuscripts that should go elsewhere: a cloud resource management paper with no energy dimension, or a general internet of things application with no power or environmental analysis, may be sound work while still being out of scope here.

Prepare the manuscript to Elsevier's guide for authors for this title, enter it through the Editorial Manager route linked from ScienceDirect, and be ready for competitive peer review, as the publisher describes its selection. Survey submissions carry an extra burden: a survey for this journal should organise a field around its energy and thermal questions, compare methods on common criteria, and identify open problems, rather than listing papers in chronological order. Across all article types, declare data and code availability honestly, describe test platforms completely, and avoid overstating environmental benefit: a saving in a component does not automatically become a saving in a whole system, and reviewers in this field are alert to that difference.

Who should read this journal

The core readership is researchers and advanced students in computer science and electrical and computer engineering who work on energy-efficient systems, together with practitioners in data-centre operations, cloud and edge infrastructure, embedded systems and smart energy applications who need research-grade evidence. It is also a reference point for sustainability researchers outside computing who want to understand what the computing sector can and cannot contribute to energy and environmental goals, because its second scope cluster publishes computing work framed explicitly in terms of ecological and societal impact. For literature searching, its value is concentration: a search inside this title on a topic such as energy-aware scheduling or green data centres returns a field-specific set that a general computer science database search would scatter across dozens of outlets.

Reading the journal in context

Sustainable computing did not become a field because of a single invention. It formed as several pressures converged: the end of easy performance gains from frequency scaling, the growth of warehouse-scale data centres, the spread of battery-powered and embedded devices, and public and corporate attention to carbon accounting. This journal's archive is a useful place to watch that convergence, because its five scope clusters preserve the different starting points from which authors arrived. A circuit paper on leakage, a scheduling paper on data-centre workloads and a sensing paper on building control may appear in the same volume, and a reader who follows the title over several years gets a more honest picture of the field than one who reads only within a single sub-discipline.

That breadth also creates a duty for authors and readers to be precise about boundaries. Energy saved in a simulation is a hypothesis until it survives contact with hardware, workload variation and user behaviour, and a rebound effect, in which efficiency lowers cost and total use rises, can erase an expected environmental gain at system level. The strongest work in this journal engages those complications directly, reports negative or mixed results where they occur, and separates three claims that weaker work merges: that a technique reduces energy in a defined test, that it would reduce energy in deployment, and that deployment would reduce environmental impact overall. Keeping those claims apart is good practice for citing the journal as well as for publishing in it, and it is the standard a careful reader should apply to any striking percentage quoted from its pages.

Verification summary

Title: Sustainable Computing: Informatics and Systems, short form SUSCOM. Publisher: Elsevier, published on ScienceDirect, corporate imprint given variously as Elsevier BV (Netherlands) in the Journals World record and Elsevier Inc. in some ranking services. Print ISSN 2210-5379; second ISSN in the site record 2210-5387. Launched 2011, announced by Elsevier in February 2011, with founding editor-in-chief Ishfaq Ahmad and special issues editor Behrooz A. Shirazi named in the launch announcement as historical roles. Frequency: four issues a year, per international listings. Peer review: competitively evaluated peer review, stated by the publisher. Ranking: Q1 in Scopus-based SCImago listings for its computer science and electrical engineering categories in the summaries consulted; h-index 63 in the Journals World record snapshot. Access: ScienceDirect, mixed by article, with open-access options under Elsevier arrangements. Current editorial board membership by name, current article processing charge and subscription price are not publicly disclosed in the sources used here in a stable form and should be checked on the publisher's pages. Internal site flag: duplicate candidate pair with post 10808, same title and print ISSN 2210-5379, the twin thin at 272 words at checking, detailed in the batch report.

Sources consulted for this profile are listed in the accompanying sources file. Facts were taken from Elsevier and ScienceDirect pages, the publisher's launch announcement, and Scopus-based ranking listings, and were paraphrased rather than reproduced.