There's a bit of talk nowadays about 'Green Computing' and what can be done to decrease the environmental impact of power hungry electronic devices. Actually, its another case of necessity being the mother of invention. If you look at the figures for the power output of modern silicon chips they are, per unit of surface area, more power hungry than the heating element of an electric fire! Datacenters groan under the weight of their cooling equipment and many now struggle to supply enough power to the racks. It's not that hardware vendors are environmental angels, its that the kit is about to burst into flames (literally in the case of some laptops!)
Perhaps we're just on the wrong place with regards to aggregating IT hardware. Maybe we should look to put as much together in one (or two or three for proper disaster recovery) place. I think the Moon is the best place to put it. Solar panels to generate electricity and just let the heat radiate way into space. The trick is to put as much kit in the same place as is possible and leave the minimum amount of information to be transferred between the Earth and the Moon. At the same time, people should have slightly more kit in their own homes, but it should be plumbed in properly so that in the winter the excess heat can contribute to heating the whole place. What we need is a global repository of soft objects, like digital photos, music and video which can be mega-cached locally and transferred via P2P processes around the globe and to and from the big MoonPuter.
Maybe I'm just going barking...
3 comments:
I really think the one company that has got great potential green fanfare is Userful with their software that can turn any single existing PC box into 10 workstations. You can check out more info on this on their site: http://www.userful.com.
By applying the power management tools you already have on your PC or laptop you can save an average of $20 per year on your energy bill and help slow global warming. Learn more about energy-efficient computing and pledge your support for the Climate Savers Computing Initiative at http://www.climatesaverscomputing.org.
I think you're right about the impact of data centre's on our environment.
Despite the fact that many desktop and laptop machines have the ability to shift to low power mode when not in use, the vast majority of these have this option disabled (approx. 90% according to the US Environmental Protection Agency). Windows XP and it’s predecessors, for example, do not allow system administrators to natively manage power settings of PC’s over a network. Vista, on the other hand, offers this functionality and 3rd party tools now offer solutions to previous operating systems’ power management. 3rd party products, however, have emerged into the marketplace to help resolve this situation; with an obvious financial cost implication (license). According to Gartner Group, PCs and monitors account for 40 percent of global IT device carbon emissions—nearly double that of data and server centres? Each year, enterprises waste nearly $4 billion powering devices that are not in use
Virtualisation; some systems may be I/O, CPU or memory intensive. The objective is to understand which virtual workloads can be combined on physical systems without causing resource constraints. The gains, however, can be as much as 70-80% cost savings (according to VMWare) with ROI witnessed as early as 3-6mths. Again, Virtualisation offer reduced energy consumption and wastage through reduced hardware requirement and greater utilisation of what is available.
One interesting approach is to understand how waste heat from data centres could be utilised by turning this into reusable electricity through "Thermal Acoustic Piezo Energy Conversion (TAPEC)“; First, the heat is converted into a single tone sound, using "thermoacoustic prime movers" aka heat engines, then 2) using existing technology: "piezoelectric" devices that are squeezed in response to pressure, including sound waves, and change that pressure into electrical current. Whether or not this technology becomes commercially viable is open to debate and time will tell.
In summary, you might be barking up the wrong tree with the moon - that simply won't happen ;-)
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