Greenlight Project For Energy Efficient California Computers

It has been a proven fact that the amount of energy consumed by the computer and the information technology industry is equal to the amount of energy consumed by the airline industry. It was also reported that these two industries exhibit the same carbon footprint.

Knowing this information, the University of California in San Diego has ventured into a new project to develop an instrument that can be used in testing the energy efficiency of computer systems under actual operating conditions. The goal of engineers and scientists from the university working on the project is to give awareness to the scientific and technological community to evaluate the way they perform their jobs with the use of computers. The program was aptly named the GreenLight project with a goal of linking the scientific community of California through a network of energy-efficient "green" computer systems and storage utilities using optical fibers and photonics.

The project will be funded by the National Science Foundation through its Major Research Instrumentation Program. $2 million will be provided by the NSF within a three year period. Additional funding of $600,000 will be provided by the University of California in San Diego, a division of the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology (Calit2) and the UCSD's Administrative Computing and Telecommunications (ACT) group.

The project aims to reduce the amount of energy consumed by the computer systems used in the scientific community of California. This can be achieved by training scientists to be energy-aware and providing energy consumption data throughout the research community to help them make informed choices regarding energy-efficient information technology infrastructure.

The rapid growth in technology and scientific research requires the use of large computing facilities to process data and information gained from the research. These computing facilities and infrastructure requires a considerable consumption of electricity to power the equipments. Computer server racks in California have grown in wattage capacity over the years, from 2 kilowatts per rack in 2000, and is expected to reach 30 kilowatts per rack in 2010. These computer systems require a separate cooling system that has a separate energy consumption chart. This results to energy costs that would exceed the cost of the hardware in only three years.

These cooling and power issues will be greatly considered by the GreenLight project. Power and cooling requirements should be understood much better in order for the scientific communities in California to enjoy the benefits in the advancements of computing much better. Scientific and technological organizations will invest in future cyberinfrastructure and will need data regarding energy efficient systems that would be cost effective in terms of power and cooling systems. GreenLight will provide these organizations with the investigation and information they need to identify or develop the optimum system.

Although efforts have already begun in the IT industry to develop "greening" strategies for major corporate organizations, the cyberinfrastructure for scientific and research entities still utilize systems with suboptimal energy environments that consumes a considerable amount of energy. The GreenLight scientists of California will study virtualization techniques for optimizing resource utilization, and will also conduct studies in power and thermal management. Studies will also be conducted to determine the behavior of scientists in using shared computational resources now that they know what the cost implications of these systems would mean. Cost-aware scientists and technologists will pave the way to the development of future technologies that are energy-efficient and safe for the environment.

Seed Newsvine

Bookmark this article in your preferred program

Comments

Add Comment

Popular Articles in this cathegory

This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License.