In the chill of a massive cave beneath an orthodox Christian cathedral in Helsinki, Finland, a city power firm is preparing what it thinks will be the greenest data center on the planet.
Excess heat from hundreds of computer servers to be located in the bedrock beneath Uspenski Cathedral, one of Helsinki's most popular tourist sites, will be captured and channeled into the district heating network, a system of water-heated pipes used to warm homes in the Finnish capital.
"It is perfectly feasible that a quite considerable proportion of the heating in the capital city could be produced from thermal energy generated by computer halls," said Juha Sipila, project manager at Helsingin Energia.
Beneath Helsinki's Uspenski Cathedral a new data center is being built whose heat will help warm homes in the Finnish capital.
(Credit: Jrielaecher/Wikimedia Commons)Finland and other north European countries are using their water-powered networks as a conduit for renewable energy sources: capturing waste to heat the water that is pumped through the system.
Due online in January, the new data center for local information technology services firm Academica is one way of addressing environmental concerns around the rise of the Internet as a central repository for the world's data and processing--known as "cloud computing."
Companies seeking large-scale, long-term cuts in information technology spending are concentrating on data centers, which account for up to 30 percent of many corporations' energy bills.
Data centers such as those run by Google already use around 1 percent of the world's energy, and their demand for power is rising fast with the trend to outsource computing.
One major problem is that in a typical data center only 40-45 percent of energy use is for the actual computing--the rest is used mostly for cooling down the servers.
"It is a pressing issue for IT vendors since the rise in energy costs to power and cool servers is estimated to be outpacing the demand for servers," said Steven Nathasingh, chief executive of research firm Vaxa.
"But IT companies cannot solve the challenge by themselves and must create new partnerships with experts in energy management like the utility companies and others," he said.
Data centers' emissions of carbon dioxide have been running at around one-third of those of airlines, but are growing 10 percent a year and now approach levels of entire countries such as Argentina or the Netherlands.
Energy savings
Besides providing heat to homes in the Finnish capital, the new Uspenski computer hall will use half the energy of a typical data center, Sipila said.
Its input into the district heating network will be comparable to one large wind turbine, or enough to heat 500 large private houses.
"Green is a great sales point, but equally important are cost savings," said Pietari Paivanen, sales head at Academica: the center, when expanded as planned, will trim 375,000 euros ($561,000) a year from the company's annual power bill. Academica's revenue in 2008 was 15 million euros.
"It's a win-win thing. We are offering the client cheap cooling as we can use the excess heat," Sipila said.
The center's location in the bowels of the cathedral has an added bonus: security. It is taking over a former bomb shelter carved into the rock by the fire brigade in World War II as a refuge for city officials from Russian air raids.
Story Copyright (c) 2009 Reuters Limited. All rights reserved.
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The Gates Center for Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University.
(Credit: Carnegie Mellon University)Please raise your hand if you've spent a lot of time in a basement environment while attempting to master one computer-related art or another.
I'm referring to any room with a noisy ventilation system, windows that don't open, and dim fluorescents overhead. You know the one. It was either so sweltering that you ended up wearing shorts in January, or kept so cold for the sake of the servers that you wore a scarf and fingerless gloves year-round.
Well, that universal rite of passage for computer lovers seems to be over for Carnegie Mellon University students thanks to a $20 million gift from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, a $10 million gift from the Henry L. Hillman Foundation, and several other donors.
The Gates Center for Computer Science and the Hillman Center for Future-Generation Technologies will officially open on September 22. The linked buildings will house research space, offices, conference rooms, laboratories, an auditorium, and classrooms for CMU's School of Computer Science.
Inside the atrium of the Gates Center.
(Credit: Carnegie Mellon University)In announcing the scheduled September 22 opening ceremony at which Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates will speak, CMU also released updated information on the Green attributes of the Gates-Hillman complex.
Through landscaping and a series of five green roofs, the university has managed to "double the amount of green space that previously existed on the 5.6-acre site," according to CMU. Professors and students using the buildings will actually be able to breathe in the fresh air created by that surrounding green foliage because the Gates-Hillman complex has over 310 windows, "most of which can be opened."
The green roofs are each equipped with heat exchange system to limit energy loss in the ventilation system. They will also collect rainwater and snow melt (gray water) that will be directed to the building's toilets.
The nine-story Gates Center has seven atria, and roughly 21,000 square feet of interior glass to insure plenty of natural light throughout the building.
"I was truly captivated also by the many cuts and atria in the building (a couple having complex series of stairways reminiscent of Hogwarts). There is even an 'impluvium' that will allow weather--including rain and snow--to enter into the building, all the way to the central 'collaborative commons' area," Peter Lee, head of the Computer Science Department and future Office Director at DARPA, described in his blog.
Both buildings have individual thermostats for each room that can be manually controlled, and are additionally linked with motion sensors to detect when they are empty so they can adjust accordingly.
Rendering of an aerial view of the completed Gates-Hillman Complex.
(Credit: Carnegie Mellon University)While it's not officially open, professors and students have already moved in. Photos of the building have also appeared on The Tartan, CMU's student newspaper.
As you would expect, there's some nostalgia for the old facilities. Mark Stehlik, professor and assistant dean for undergraduate education at the School of Computer Science, had his dim, overcrowded office memorialized with a Gigapan snapshot, according to Lee.
Update 7:22 a.m. PDT: Photos were added to this story since it was originally published.
OpSource is hosting a very timely conference in San Francisco this week on software-as-a-service. What with the meltdown in the economy and continuing concern about the cost and environmental impact of energy use, there's interest in how cloud computing will impact the IT world.
And what better way to cut through the hype over the so-called green aspects of SaaS than to assemble veteran technologists who might share their experiences with the uninitiated? That's the usual format: People ready to impart knowledge to people eager to receive knowledge.
(Credit:
CNET News)
Good idea but, well, maybe another day.
As I sat in a cavernous ballroom in San Francisco's Westin St. Francis Hotel scribbling down notes, it dawned on me that I was one of, literally, a handful of people listening to the lecturer. At most, there were 10 or 15 of us--a pity because as he faced a sea of mostly empty seats, Randy Bias, a technology strategist for GoGrid, a supplier of cloud computing infrastructure, offered up a convincing brief on the energy-saving advantages of virtualization and why it makes sense to offload server functions to the cloud.
He was followed on stage by Adrian Bowles, a director at Datamonitor, who was equally eloquent about why there are compelling business reasons to rip up the procedures of hardware provisioning that IT followed until the recession (some call it a depression) hit. "The old days of 'buy it, plug it in, and run it' are probably gone forever," Bowles said, proceeding to lay out a hard-headed case on behalf of going green.
By then, I counted eight people--eight--in the ballroom (not including the speaker). Most of the folks attending this two-day kaffeeklatsch couldn't be bothered with a topic that obviously bored them silly. No matter that green tech at its most basic is technology done with a low environmental impact. For some reason, a discussion of low-energy technologies, virtualization, and improved cooling techniques weren't enough to hook them.
As they used to say back in my Brooklyn neighborhood, whaddya gonna do? But truth be told, I was puzzled by all the no-shows. It wasn't as if the other sessions being held at the same time--"SaaS marketing in a downturn" and "Architecting and delivery for SaaS success"--were so much more thrilling.
Could it be that "green" remains too squishy a concept for most of these red-blooded show-me-the-money types? I buttonholed one attendee in a hallway, who agreed as he was munching down a free ice cream provided by the show's sponsors. But the proverbial man on the street interview doesn't suffice.
I heard it said at one of the sessions how IT compensation plans now hinge on how successful you are doing projects faster and doing them more inexpensively. That's why SaaS advocates believe their timing couldn't be any better. Maybe that's misplaced optimism; we'll see as the year progresses.
But this much is clear: telling the boss that you're saving the environment in the process is not likely to be the clincher. Ever.
You might have heard of or even used a powerline network adapter, such as the one made by Netgear that plugs directly into the wall. Now think of a similar-looking device that's an entire computer.
The SheevaPlug computer.
(Credit: Marvell)Marvell on Tuesday introduced a new kind of personal computer, called SheevaPlug, along with its Plug Computing initiative. The idea is to make make a high-performance, ultracompact, and green computer that consumers can plug right into a wall power socket.
Because the SheevaPlug draws less than a tenth of the power of a typical PC being used as a home server, according to Marvell, it can be left on all the time. And although it is very similar to a powerline adapter in shape and size, the SheevaPlug computer contains a gigahertz-class processor to offer PC-like performance.
The current SheevaPlug model uses a Marvell Kirkwood processor running at 1.2GHz, is equipped with 512 megabytes of flash memory storage and 512MB DRAM, and connects to a network via Gigabit Ethernet. The computer has one USB 2.0 port that can be used to host directly attached storage or to connect to other networking and storage devices.
If it's not obvious, you won't be able to install Windows Vista on the SheevaPlug; instead, it supports multiple standard Linux 2.6 kernel distributions. It seems that the only way to interact with it is via a Web browser.
If you are a developer interested in finding out what this plug-in computer can do, the SheevaPlug development kit is available now for $99, cheaper than most powerline network adapters. Rumor has it that the price will even be reduced in the next few months.
Sentilla's microcomputers for monitoring energy consumption are just larger than a dime.
(Credit: Sentilla)Sentilla, a company that makes energy management technology for industrial and commercial facilities, announced Wednesday that it has secured $7.5 million in Series B funding from Onset Ventures and Claremont Creek Ventures.
The energy-management tech company has patented technology that allows people to use microcomputers to remotely monitor the energy consumption of industrial machines, and allow those machines to exchange data with one another, to collaboratively direct energy supplies to facilities as needed.
The communication between the human monitor and the machines themselves is done through a series of small pervasive computers mounted either at the machine or in the vicinity that can communicate through wireless networks.
Each Sentilla Mini computer is essentially a Texas Instruments MSP430 microcontroller with a TI/Chipcon CC2420 low-power wireless radio that runs on two AAA batteries, according to the company. The computer is roughly the size of a dime and is loaded with Sentilla Point, a Java-compliant software platform.
In corporate-speak this type of service is referred to as a "demand-side energy management solution."
But Sentilla's technology does not only manage industrial machines.
It can also be embedded in commercial spaces or office buildings to monitor things like whether employees turn off the lights in conference rooms when not in use.
The technology was tested for this type of purpose at the Moscone Center in San Francisco during the JavaOne 2008 conference.
About 200 of Sentilla's microcomputers were mounted throughout two convention halls covering about 700,000 square feet. The computers collected data on the number of people exiting and entering the rooms, electricity usage, lighting, humidity, and temperature, then relayed the information back to a main computer via a wireless network.
By analyzing the collected data, Sentilla was able to determine attendee movement and energy consumption behavior, and make recommendations on how temperature controls, lighting, and electricity might better be allocated in the spaces.
Harvard University and IBM have launched a project to harness the computing muscle of thousands of computers to discover cheap solar energy materials.
The initiative, announced Monday, is part of the IBM-sponsored World Community Grid, which seeks to speed up research on humanitarian challenges with a grid of connected computers.
The idea is that people and organizations donate computing time to these efforts. A grid server doles out tasks to disparate machines to speed up computational jobs.
IBM also said that it will test running the grid software on an internal compute cloud to tap idle time.
Existing World Community Grid projects are aimed at developing a more nutritious rice as well as conducting cancer and AIDS research. The Harvard project wants to test the chemical properties of a number of organic materials with the aim of determining which are most promising for use as solar cells.
An example of organic solar cells. Konarka makes the plastic cells in a roll-to-roll printing process. Because they are flexible and relatively cheap to make, they can be used in tents, solar chargers, or even clothing.
(Credit: Martin LaMonica/CNET Networks)The advantage of organic solar cells is that they are much cheaper to manufacture than traditional silicon and are flexible and lightweight. Some kinds can make electricity with a broader spectrum of light, including indoor light.
On the other hand, these cells aren't as efficient at converting light to electricity and they degrade more quickly.
By parsing out the the computing research across several computers, Harvard researcher Alan Aspuru-Guzik said that the project can be completed in 2 years. Using a traditional supercomputer cluster to run the analysis would take 22 years.
"It would take us about 100 days of computational time to screen each of the thousands of compounds for electronic properties without the power of World Community Grid," he said in a statement.
The World Community Grid is tailored to public and nonprofit organizations but IBM has a number of projects in solar and the energy business.
Its commercial research group has three solar-related programs, including the development of thin-film solar cells from CIGS (a combination of copper, indium, gallium, and selenide) and technology to manufacture solar concentrators.
IBM is also very active in developing smart grid software and services for electric utilities.
Scores rose from an average of 4 points to peak at 6.6 last September, and then fell back to 4 as the watchdog group toughened its criteria.
(Credit: Elsa Wenzel/CNET Networks)Nintendo is the least eco-friendly electronics maker, and Microsoft is barely better, according to Greenpeace. The environmental group rated the practices and designs of gadget makers lower than ever in its eighth quarterly report card (PDF).
Only two corporations scored above 5 out of 10 possible points in the report released Wednesday, down from 14 companies in March. Apple, for one, tumbled to 4.1 points in June after earning 6.7 in March more than a year after Steve Jobs' highly-publicized pledge to remove toxic ingredients from products and improve product takeback options.
Among the paltry few brands whose scores have improved is Nintendo, which ranked last with a .8 score. That was better than .3 in the spring and zero in December 2007. Greenpeace nailed the game console maker for failing to phase out toxic chemicals and for neglecting to help customers recycle.
A quick comparison of present and past scores may make it seem as if consumer electronics makers are reversing their progress since Greenpeace released its report in 2006.
That's because the eco-watchdog has raised the bar with the June version of its rankings.
The group is weighing more heavily the reduction of toxic chemicals and power hunger of gadgets, in addition to each brand's e-waste practices.
As for the latest scores, Nokia would have been at the top of the heap, had it not lost a point for failed recycling in India.
Sony and Sony-Ericsson tied for the top slot with 5.1 points each, largely for efforts to reduce plastic ingredients such as PVC and phthalates.
With a middling 4.1 score, Apple won marks for removing the same potential hazards from key products including iPods, iMacs, and the MacBook Air, and as well as for taking mercury out of the MacBook Air and some MacBook Pros. Apple has reported a 9.5 percent recycling rate on products sold seven years ago.
By any measure, Microsoft continued to show up near the bottom of the heap. It did not set goals to eliminate PVC or hazardous flame retardants, and it ranked near the bottom of the Greenpeace ratings. The only bright point in Greenpeace's estimation was in Microsoft's timeline to eliminate toxic phthalates from gadgets by 2010.
Despite the dismal-looking scores, those in the electronics sector are increasingly making concerted efforts to create less polluting products.
There's still a long way to go before PCs and gadgets of every stripe stop wasting power and winding up in landfills or e-scrap waste yards.
But for much of this young century, at least, most big, global names in the business have been complying with European rules to reduce hazardous substances, such as lead from solder in circuit boards and mercury from monitors.
In addition, designers are playing with modular designs and biodegradable materials that can easily be taken apart or broken down. Efforts are also on the rise to create universal power supply standards to stop phantom power waste.
Greenpeace aims to keep electronics makers on their toes with its rankings system.
SANTA CLARA, Calif.--Revamping existing data centers can achieve energy efficiency close to those built from scratch to be greener, according to an early report Thursday from Accenture, which analyzed results of case studies backed by the Silicon Valley Leadership Group.
The energy savings explored, if widespread, could prevent the release of carbon dioxide equivalent to taking 8 million cars off the road, researchers said.
Data center energy use could double by 2011, amounting to $7.4 billion in U.S. electricity costs and requiring the equivalent of 10 new power plants, according to the Environmental Protection Agency.
"Just because you're not (running) a new data center doesn't mean you can sit back," said Teresa Tung, senior researcher at Accenture Technology Labs, which pooled results of studies in which Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and tech heavyweights including Yahoo, Sun, and Oracle collaborated.
Online activity may exist in the cloud, but for each e-mail sent or movie downloaded, a "little puff of carbon" is emitted somewhere on the back-end, as Sun vice president of engineering Subodh Bapat has described.
Projected growth in IT power consumption outpaces that of any other industry, noted Ray Pfeifer, chair of data center efficiency for the Silicon Valley Leadership Group, which organized a summit at Sun's headquarters, where study results were presented.
Many tech leaders fear the sector will suffer from rising energy costs and anticipated California caps on carbon emissions.
Some consider their data center details to be trade secrets, but more are opening up to each other to try to reduce the industry's carbon footprint. Case in point, some say, are the collaborative demonstration projects, which put into practice recommendations on data center efficiency (PDF) presented to Congress in 2007 by the EPA.
New data centers using the suggested technologies could achieve 79 percent infrastructure efficiency, according to Tung of Accenture. Older data centers applying the tweaks weren't far behind at 74 percent efficiency.
A holistic approach to IT transformation can reduce the electrical use of data centers better than individual site improvements, Tung added.
Useful systems included airflow management with variable fan drives and water side economizers. In addition to promoting consolidation and virtualization, researchers underscored the importance of better managing virtual environments.
Standards are needed to improve security and optimize the virtual environment, said David Thompson, chief information officer at Symantec, which he said saved $40 million through consolidating data centers last year.
Sun Microsystems has reduced its number of data centers from a dozen five years ago to seven today, said chief information officer Bob Worrall, adding that he'd like that to drop to three data centers in the next several years.
"People are saying there are five fuels: coal, nuclear, gas, and oil," said PK Agarwal, chief technology officer for the state of California. "But efficiency is the fifth fuel."
The full report of the data center demonstration projects' results is set to become available July 11.
Other data center hosts for the case studies were Symantec, NetApp, Synopsys, the U.S. Post Office, and Digital Realty Trust. Also participating in the research were SynapSense, APC, Cassatt, IBM, Liebert, Modius, Power Assure, PowerSmiths, Rittal, SprayCool, the California Energy Commisison, and PG&E.
The number of personal computers in use around the world has exceeded 1 billion and will double by 2014, with most growth coming from developing markets, according to Gartner research released Monday.
A 12 percent annual increase would amount to more than 2 billion PCs in use by 2014, according to a report that counted installed machines rather than laptops and desktops sold.
Emerging markets will account for 70 percent of the next billion PCs to come online, Gartner analysts suggested. They named dropping prices and improved Internet access as factors driving that trend.
Fifty-eight percent of today's PCs are owned by U.S., European, and Japanese users, Gartner found.
This year, some 180 million computers, or 16 percent of those currently in use globally, will be retired.
"We estimate a fifth of these, or some 35 million PCs, will be dumped into landfill with little or no regard for their toxic content," Meike Escherich, principal research analyst at Gartner, said in a statement. The challenge of disposing safely of electronics waste will also expand in developing markets in the coming years, she added.
The government's Energy Star program and the tech industry's Climate Savers Computing Initiative will work over the next three years to develop more-efficient standards for consumer electronics.
"Today's partnership announcement unites Energy Star and industry in an effort to rally the technology industry to reduce computer energy consumption and fight climate change," said Bob Meyers, principal deputy assistant administrator for the EPA's Office of Air and Radiation, in a press release.
Energy Star, launched in 1992 by the Environmental Protection Agency, is considered the first "green" U.S. consumer label for electronics and household appliances.
The Climate Savers collection of businesses and environmental nonprofits aims to halve the power consumption of computers by 2010. Leading members include Google, Microsoft, Pacific Gas & Electric, and the World Wildlife Fund. The group of some 180 enterprises also includes Starbucks.
From now on, Climate Savers will recommend that businesses and consumers follow Energy Star specifications--or even tougher--when buying computers, in addition to using power management tools. The two partners will also pool some marketing efforts.
The move marks a step toward standardizing various consumer labels related to sustainability.
Along similar lines, the utility-funded 80 Plus label marks power supplies that achieve at least 80 percent efficiency.
Shoppers seeking rankings of sustainably-crafted, power-sipping PCs can also look for the nonprofit-led EPEAT label, which is being adopted this year by online retailers.
