Can We Stop The Internet Destroying Our Planet?

In February 2007 Industry insiders were shocked after seeing the first comprehensive report to determine how much energy consumption are being used by computers. Jonathan Koomey, a staff scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California, found worldwide energy use by servers had doubled between 2000 and 2005. Bill St Arnaud of Canarie, Canada’s internet development organisation in Ottawa, Ontario had said “Everyone thought CO2 emissions were a problem for transportation and big energy”. A study by UK-based Global Action Plan puts Carbon Dioxide (C02) emissions on the same plane as then aviation industry that amounts to 2-per-cent of global emissions.

A week after Koomey’s report was published; industry giants that include Microsoft, Intel, Dell, IBM and Sun Microsystems formed a body known as the Green Grid. Its purpose was to resolve a host of hardware and software problems in data centres-farms of servers that store and retrieve online information. They saw energy efficiency as a large problem that they formed collaboration is essential to combat this, backed by Lawrence Lamers of software company VMware in Palo Alto, California, which makes virtualisation software regarded by many in the industry as a prime way to save energy.

At about the same time, energy consultancies identified weaknesses associated with “server sprawl” and began to brain-storm for solutions. These included solar and hydroelectric power, converting alternating current from mains to direct current (DC) just one in the data centre instead of repeating the process many times at different servers, as it happens today.

Googles among other data centres use some renewable energy; these measures are unlikely to be enough. DC conversion need significant revamps in infrastructure, with companies on the look out for technologies they can now use.

Mark Monroe of Sun Microsystems, Green Grid director states another major reason driving companies to cut energy consumption is the concern about supply, he said, “We are trying to make data centres efficient enough so that they don’t outstrip energy availability”.

The demand for greener computing is huge. Downloading music, sending emails, access medical records, or making a credit card payment; all these actions are processed in a data centre.

With You Tube, millions of video downloads by millions of users; Yahoo giving away free email with unlimited storage, there is a need by many servers to store gazillion of emails.

The Green Grid’s biggest achievement to date is a first attempt at finding a standardised way to measure the efficiency of data centres. This would allow customers to compare centres and companies to identify the worst offenders and upgrade them.

IBM that provides data storage and number crunching services for financial, pharmaceutical and retail sectors. In May it pledged to invest $1bn, £500m annually in a project called Big Green, its purpose is to double computing capacity at IBM’s data centres without increasing energy consumption. “This is absolutely one of IBM’s Key plays right now” says Chris Scott, head of IBM data centre services for north-east Europe.” It saving us money, it’s giving us growth capacity, and it’s the right thing to do for the environment”.

Like many members of the Green Grid, IBM is making virtualisation software a central part of its greening strategy. Virtualisation is now seen as the low-hanging fruit in data centres’ green transition. Virtualisation software creates multiple “virtual machines” which are layers of software that emulate a particular type of hardware. Each VM sits between actual hardware and a specific software application, and looks like hardware to the application. Running applications on VMs instead of directly on the hardware means separate applications can’t interfere with each other, and if one application crashes, it doesn’t affect others.

When servers replaced mainframes, there was no need to partition them with virtualisation as each server was built to execute one application. But the processing power of servers has now increased to the point that running only one program per server typically means using less than 15-per-cent of its capacity. The solution to this is to run several applications on a single server, as with mainframes.

In 2001, WMware introduced the first virtualisation software written specifically for the type of servers widely used in data centres. ” It makes the difference between buying 10 servers or buying just one, says Bogomil Balkansky at VMware. “Customers are able to reduce energy use levels by up to 70-80-per-cent. It is an excellent way to immediately and drastically reduce power consumption in the data centre. In August, as a result IBM was able to replace 3900 of its Intel servers with 33 larger ones that were more efficient multicore chips. “That is an 80-per-cent reduction in energy consumption and an 85-per-cent reduction in space”, Scott says.

Other Green Grid members believe that an important contribution is improving the efficiency of applications themselves. Arjan van de Ven, software engineer at chip market Intel, is leading initiative called Linux open source operating system more efficient.

Many companies including Google run their data centres on Linux. By tweaking existing Linux code, Van de Ven and his team were able to find programs that were behaving badly. This revealed Linux was performing a lot of small senseless tasks.

Because Linux is open-source they were able to re-write the program so that it checks CPU activity less often. The team also found energy wasters in a version of Linux that runs on personal computers. These include a program that checks the email inbox 100 times per-second even though the inbox only ask the server if there is a new email every 5 minutes; a clock that updates every second even though it displays the time in minutes; and a programs that asks the hardware 10 times a second if the volume of a speaker has changed even though another program is already set up to tell the hardware when speaker volume changes. ”These sound like little things, but if you have 40 programs that do this, they add up”, says Van de Ven. The team have made upgrades available via various open-source software mailing list over last year, and two versions of Linux for laptops have incorporated them.

Google, conservation group WWF and Intel are members of the Climate Savers Computing initiative, a collaboration Intel helped to introduce in 2007. Rather than focusing on data centre as a whole, the CSI is looking at how to improve the efficiency of individual servers. One strategy that Google has already used on some computers is eliminating voltage conversions within individual computers.

In the future, CSI directors imagine having personal computers that can adjust their energy consumption in proportion to their workload. Today’s computers tend to use the same amount of energy, no matter what they are doing.

Bill Weihl of Google, who is also co-chair of the CSI, is optimistic that its efforts and that of the Green Grid will cut the amount of energy data centres and personal computers use. Whether it is enough to offset the predicted growth in computer use over the next 20 years “is hard to predict”, he says.