Senior Project - SINN

Amadeus is a rapidly-growing software consulting firm based in Boulder, Colorado. With forty full time employees, Amadeus focuses on rapidly delivering effective software solutions. Like many businesses, Amadeus provides desktop computers to their employees. These computers represent a substantial portion of Amadeus' monthly power consumption. This power consumption is not only expensive (in excess of $5000 per month), but it also contributes to increased carbon emissions from power plants supplying that power.

A potential mitigation for this energy usage problem is to turn desktop machines off when they are not being used. This could result in an energy savings of 50% or more. Unfortunately, at a technical firm such as Amadeus, employees frequently depend on remote access to their desktop machines while away from the office. A method for controlling the power state of these computer systems from a remote location was needed.

The goal of this project was to produce a simple system that could be deployed in small and medium businesses with minimal effort, and that offers the features and usability that typical office users, rather than highly-technical system administrators, require. Project SINN presents a web-based interface through which administrators are able to add machines to the system and then delegate control of specific machines to various users. Users in turn are then able to control the systems (typically their own office workstations) that have been assigned to them -- putting the machines to sleep, waking them up, powering them down -- all from a browser anywhere on the internet.

Although the concept and the user interface might appear rather simple on the surface, SINN required a significant level of underlying complexity in its design and implementation to provide a reliable and easy-to-use service. The system takes advantage of a number of current technologies that facilitate development such as C#, the Microsoft .NET Framework 3.5, ASP.NET 3.5 and Windows Communication Foundation. Additionally SOAP and web services, which make SINN secure and reliable, were used extensively.