DAAC 2021

The 4th International Industry/University Workshop on Data-center Automation, Analytics, and Control (DAAC 2021)** was planned for the 14th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Utility and Cloud Computing (UCC 2021) hosted in December 2021 in Leicester, UK with a special focus on Data Center Control for Renewable Energy Applications. This focus was intended to attract contributions and submissions related to the following topics:

• Remote operation of data centers including energy sources and equipment

• Site planning considerations for computational facilities near renewable energy sources

• Economics of operations in renewable energy settings

• Role of automation in improving computational uptime and usage efficiency

• Workflow control and management in renewable energy settings

• Energy forecasting and prediction for interactions with computational scheduling algorithms

• Regional and geographic considerations for managing job and data migration

• Current usage of renewable energy in commercial versus research infrastructures

• Reducing environmental impact of cryptocurrency and blockchain applications

• Future forecasts for data center energy availability and usage

** Due to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, the 2021 DAAC workshop event was held in the form of a 1.5-hour expert panel entitled "Computing in the Era of Climate Change" involving a wide variety of participants from industry and academia covering the above topics as well as practical steps that can be taken in the near future to improve sustainability in the computing and data processing arena. This panel took place Wednesday, December 8, 2021 from 3:00 to 5:00 UK time and was available for remote participation. See the UCC 2021 website and the panel description page for further details. A video recording of the full panel discussion is also available.