UK study on how grids and virtualization reduce CO2 by universities

[Excerpts from Guardian article. Universities and their funding bodies around the world should take note --BSA]

http://education.guardian.co.uk/link/story/0,,2278356,00.html
Why the future's green for IT

A survey into ways in which colleges and universities can make computing greener and more sustainable is about to publish its preliminary findings.

Higher Education Environment Performance Improvement (Heepi) and SustainIT, an NGO set up to focus on the environmental and social impact of IT, are researching how sustainable further and higher education IT is, and how education best practice compares with the private sector.

The report being written for the Joint Information System Committee (Jisc) says green IT is best achieved through the collaboration of IT and estates management. It finds that increased energy and computing costs can be offset by technologies such as grid computing and virtualisation. The need to reduce carbon the footprint is behind a cull of wasteful IT practices.

The author of the report, Peter James, who is also part-time professor of environmental management at Bradford University and associate director of SustainIT, says: "Eighty to 90% of a computer's capacity is wasted.

"By linking PCs together we can run complex computing tasks broken down into manageable chunks when the computers are not in normal classroom use."

[..]
Virtualisation offers much more dramatic savings. "This is one component of grid computing that's really going mainstream," says Berry. "Many servers set up to run a single application are running at less than 10% capacity. By using virtualisation you can bring several applications onto one server and use less energy for IT, power and cooling."

[...]
Meanwhile, Cardiff University has come up with an innovative solution to the cost of running super computers for research projects by centralising departments' IT budgets and transferring byte-hungry number-crunching to clusters of smaller high-performance computers. The project is called Arcca (advanced research computing at Cardiff).

"Before Arcca, departments ran their own computers for their own researchers," says Dr Hugh Beedie, Cardiff's chief technology officer, who was personally charged with reducing IT costs throughout the institution. "When they weren't online the computers were idle. Now we manage things centrally and any researcher can access our super computer cluster." [...]

The Best Place to Build Zero Carbon Data Centers in North America

[It is good to see a growing recognition by industry of the importance of zero carbon data centers. I think it is imperative that academia also move in this direction. As I have mentioned cyber-infrastructure is increasingly one of the biggest power consumers on many campuses and, as a result, a large contributor by universities to Green House Gas emissions. Funding agencies can play a critical role by developing Private-Public-Partnerships (PPP) much like the NSF has done with IBM and Google to assist universities to move their campus cyber-infrastructure to zero carbon data centers. Thanks to Doug Alder also maintains an excellent blog on this subject--BSA]

The Virtual Data Center - http://www.rackforce.com/blog/?p=59
Is Your Data Center Green Enough - http://www.rackforce.com/blog/?p=49
GigaCenter: Where We are Going - http://www.rackforce.com/blog/?p=48


The Best Place to Build a Data Center in North America http://www.cio.com/article/183256/The_Best_Place_to_Build_a_Data_Center_in_North_America

It's Kelowna, British Columbia, says IBM, which is working with Rackforce to open a huge data center in this small city far from earthquake and flood zones, close to cheap power sources and just a short flight from Vancouver.


But what most tourist brochures don't mention is that the Okanagan also is becoming known in IT spheres for something else: data processing and storage.

Thanks to its seismic stability, cheap and accessible power and a talented workforce, the Okanagan recently has seen a proliferation of data services vendors and has attracted interest from at least one major international corporation to build one of the biggest data centers in the world.

When it opens later this year, this $100 million data center—appropriately dubbed the Gigacentre—will total 85,000 square feet and will have the capacity to store nearly 35,000 terabytes of data. Put differently, the Gigacentre will generate more than 700 watts per square foot, while most data centers currently generate a maximum of 300 watts per square foot.

The Gigacentre is a joint venture between IBM and Rackforce, a local hosting service provider. It will be IBM's first data center in British Columbia and is powered by hydroelectric energy from the Columbia River

Brian Fry, vice president and cofounder of Rackforce, says the center, expected to open by this summer, will cement the Okanagan's position as the new data capital of the West—a position that could be particularly intriguing for U.S. companies who are looking to keep mission-critical in

Clouds, Grids and Resources for Green Cyber-Infrastructure

[Increasingly universities and research centers around the world are recognizing that the pursuit of scientific research without thinking about the consequences of power consumption or the impact on the environment is no longer an option. Cyber-Infrastructure and eScience in particular is placing huge new demands on campus power systems. In an growing number of situations high energy consuming HPC and instrumentation systems need to be located off campus, ideally at zero carbon data centers. Even the quintessential cyber-infrastructure project - the Large Hadron Collider at CERN - is now looking to offload computational tasks to other sites around the world because of power limitations and costs at CERN. Researchers also need to move their computational requirements to grids and clouds (whose underlying servers are also located at zero carbon data centers) in order to reduce power consumption load on their campuses (and in my opinion, it will also improve their eScience capabilities). Here is a list of some resources I have compiled that may help those researchers who are serious about reducing their carbon footprint -- BSA]

CyberInfrastructure 2.0 Blog
http://blog.cybera.ca/

BCnet Workshop on Green Cyber-Infrastructure
May 22 Vancouver


CLS workshop on web services for remote instrumentation http://www.lightsource.ca/medsi-sri2008/workshops.php#remote

The tools being developed by researchers to allow remote access for scientific instruments such as under the ocean or remote beam lines will serve as a model for future "green" cyber-infrastructure. Because of the huge power demands of new big science instruments and computers combined with the increasing shortage for power at our existing research centers means increasingly these facilities will have to be located in remote zero carbon, renewable energy, science centers. Instruments and computation will need to be accessed remotely.

Green House and Green Computing at Norte Dame http://ianfoster.typepad.com/blog/2008/04/greenhouse-and.html

Clouds over Chicago http://ianfoster.typepad.com/blog/2008/04/clouds-over-chi.html
Integration of Grids and Clouds

4th International IEEE Computer Society Technical Committee on Scalable Computing eScience 2008 Conference http://escience2008.iu.edu

Organizing committees of the 4th International IEEE Computer Society Technical Committee on Scalable Computing eScience 2008 Conference are now accepting papers and proposals for tutorials; posters, exhibits, and demos; and workshops and special sessions.

Topics of interest cover applications and technologies related to e-Science and grid and cloud computing. They include, but are not limited to, the following:

* Application development environments
* Autonomic, real-time, and self-organizing grids
* Cloud computing and storage
* Collaborative science models and techniques
* Enabling technologies: Internet and Web services
* e-Science for applications including physics, biology, astronomy, chemistry, finance, engineering, and the humanities
* Grid economy and business models
* Problem-solving environments
* Programming paradigms and models
* Resource management and scheduling
* Security challenges for grids and e-Science
* Sensor networks and environmental observatories
* Service-oriented grid architectures
* Virtual instruments and data access management
* Virtualization for technical computing
* Web 2.0 technology and services for e-Science


NSF Cluster Exploratory Project http://www.nsf.gov/news/news_summ.jsp?cntn_id=111186

In an open letter to the academic computing research community, Jeannette Wing, the assistant director at NSF for CISE, said that the relationship will give the academic computer science research community access to resources that would be unavailable to it otherwise.

"Access to the Google-IBM academic cluster via the CluE program will provide the academic community with the opportunity to do research in data-intensive computing and to explore powerful new applications," Wing said. "It can also serve as a tool for educating the next generation of scientists and engineers."

"Google is proud to partner with the National Science Foundation to provide computing resources to the academic research community," said Stuart Feldman, vice president of engineering at Google Inc. "It is our hope that research conducted using this cluster will allow researchers across many fields to take advantage of the opportunities afforded by large-scale, distributed computing."

"Extending the Google/IBM academic program with the National Science Foundation should accelerate research on Internet-scale computing and drive innovation to fuel the applications of the future," said Willy Chiu, vice president of IBM Software Strategy and High Performance On Demand Solutions. "IBM is pleased to be collaborating with the NSF on this project."

In October of last year, Google and IBM created a large-scale computer cluster of approximately 1600 processors to give the academic community access to otherwise prohibitively expensive resources. Fundamental changes in computer architecture and increases in network capacity are encouraging software developers to take new approaches to computer-science problem solving. In order to bridge the gap between industry and academia, it is imperative that academic researchers are exposed to the emerging computing paradigm behind the growth of "Internet-scale" applications.

This new relationship with NSF will expand access to this research infrastructure to academic institutions across the nation. In an effort to create greater awareness of research opportunities using data-intensive computing, the CISE directorate will solicit proposals from academic researchers. NSF will then select the researchers to have access to the cluster and provide support to the researchers to conduct their work. Google and IBM will cover the costs associated with operating the cluster and will provide other support to the researchers. NSF will not provide any funding to Google or IBM for these activities.

While the timeline for releasing the formal request for proposals to the academic community is still being developed, NSF anticipates being able to support 10 to 15 research projects in the first year of the program, and will likely expand the number of projects in the future.

Information about the Google-IBM Academic Cluster Computing Initiative can be found at http://www.google.com/intl/en/press/pressrel/20071008_ibm_univ.html

Excellent example of Zero Carbon Data Center in Wymoning

[One of the world's first zero carbon data centers has been built in Cheyenne, which is taking advantage of the natural cooling because of its location in the northern US. Several more of these zero carbon data centers are being deployed around the world such as Bastionhost.com in Nova Scotia. To my mind zero carbon data centers are more important than targeting energy efficiency as a way of reducing the impact of Internet on global warming. There are many thousands of untapped renewable energy sites around the world which are uneconomical to develop by traditional power companies because of the cost of transmission lines etc. But rather than bringing power to the datacenters in major urban areas, it would be much easier to move the data centers to the renewable power sites with relatively low cost optical networks. As well the power will be essentially be free, because no other industry sector can compete for this power because of its remoteness -- BSA]


http://www.greenhousedata.com/green_datacenter/index.htm


100% Renewable Energy Wind Energy
The entire facility IS powered by wind generated renewable power. The company will own several wind turbines to the north of its facility and purchase the excess energy needs from the local power company's wind farm or through grid tied green-e tags.

The facility will represent the largest wind powered public data center in the nation with over 10,000 square feet of raised floor computing facilities. Don't be alarmed by the 100% renewable energy, reliability is a must. The company ensures this by being tied to the main power grid with contracts to purchase supplemental renewable (wind) energy from the local power company.

Energy Efficiency Built In Energy Efficiency
Green House Data is working with MKK and APC to build out the green data center. As part of our highly refined Green efforts,Green House Data will opperate its facility at approximately 60% greater energy efficiency than the average data center.

The Data Center will leverage the following attributes to gain the efficiencies:

* Water-Side Economizers: Free cooling from Cheyenne's average annual temperatures of 45.6 degrees.
* Server Side Cooling - Cooling directly at the source of the heat for managed services.
* Modular Scalable Data Center - matching maximum efficiencies without over building and waste.
* Efficient Floor Layout and Design - aligning hot aisle/cold aisles for heat capture and efficient cooling.
* Ground Source Heat Pumps - provide up to 25% more energy efficient cooling than traditional HVAC cooling equipment.

Excellent report on Internet Data Centers and Global Warming

This is a good comprehensive report but surprisingly misses the entire subject of Khazzoom-Brookes postulate (aka Jevons Paradox) which refutes the entire argument of energy efficiency. Khazzoom-Brookes have effectively demonstrated that improved efficiency actually results in increased energy consumption as it decreases the overall cost of a product or service and therefore increases demand.

For more details please see my blog on energy efficiency and data centers as well a paper prepared in part for the OECD on this subject. The OECD is also having a workshop where this subject will be discusses in Denmark May 22-23.--BSA]

Paper on Khazzoom-Brookes postulate and datacenters http://docs.google.com/Doc?id=dgbgjrct_2767dxpbdvcf


Some excerpts from the McKinsey report
http://uptimeinstitute.org/content/view/168/57

For many industries, data centers are one of the largest sources of Greenhouse Gas (GHG) emissions. As a group, their overall emissions are significant, in-scale with industries such as airlines. Even with immediate efficiency improvements (and adoption of new technologies) enterprises and their equipment providers will face increased scrutiny given the projected quadrupling of their data-center GHG emissions by 2020

Significant failings in asset management (6% average server utilization, 56% facility utilization). Up to 30% of servers are dead [i.e. not being used at all, but consuming power nevertheless]

Data center facilities spend (CapEx and OpEx) is a large, quickly growing and very inefficient portion of the total IT budget in many technology intensive industries such as financial services and telecommunications. Some intensive data center users will face meaningfully reduced profitability if current trends continue

True costs are often 4-5x the cost of the server alone over a 5-10 year lifetime of a server

Incremental US demand for data center energy between now and 2010 is equivalent of 10 new power plants

EPA has advocated use of separate energy meters for large data centers

Green Internet/ICT will help Japan reach 90% of its Kyoto target

[Another excellent presentation from the recent ITU conference in Kyoto on ICTs and Climate Change. In his presentation Dr. Yuji INOUE, President & CEO The Telecommunication Technology Committee (TTC) demonstrated that it is possible for Japan to reach 90% of it Kyoto target to reduce CO2 emissions (68m tones) through application of ICT to various everyday activities, especially de-materialization and trading eProducts and eServices for their physical counterpart. Even if a more realistic outcome is closer to 50% of the Kyoto target, this is still a significant impact on CO2 emissions for Japan. I believe we can achieve even more significant results by moving all Internet network and computational facilities to zero carbon data centers and using carbon rewards as opposed to carbon taxes, to underwrite the costs next generation last mile networks in order that consumers fully utilize eProducts and eServices --BSA]

ITU - ICTs and Climate Change http://www.itu.int/ITU-T/worksem/climatechange/programme-kyoto.html

Dr Yuji INOUE's presentation http://www.itu.int/dms_pub/itu-t/oth/06/0F/T060F0060080025PDFE.pdf

Excellent presentations on ICT and the Environment

[Recently the ITU and IDC in Canada held conferences on the subject of the impact of ICT and environment. As well the OECD is holding a workshop on this theme in Denmark on May 21-22. As at any such conference there was the usual mix of bromides and platitudes about energy efficiency, tele-presence, tele-working- to all of which I am remain extremely skeptical. However the GeSI study pointed out that ICT can have a major impact in "de-materialization" and building zero carbon networks and distributed computing architectures. The later will enable the ICT industry to have a zero or negative carbon footprint, and the former can reduce overall CO2 emissions by much as 10%. The challenge is how to promote de-materialization? I have long advocated the equivalent of a carbon tax - but where the revenue from such a tax goes directly to the consumer rather than the government, under the condition that customer is restricted to buying products and services that have essentially a zero carbon footprint such as fiber and high speed Internet to the home, eMovies, eMusic etc
http://free-fiber-to-the-home.blogspot.com/ --BSA]

GeSI presentation at ITU http://www.idc.com/getdoc.jsp?containerId=IDC_P16849&pageType=EVENTPROCEEDINGS

ITU Conference on ICTs and Environment http://www.itu.int/ITU-T/worksem/climatechange/programme-kyoto.html

IDC Conference on ICTs and Environment http://www.itu.int/dms_pub/itu-t/oth/06/0F/T060F0060080003PDFE.pdf