New low Carbon Notebooks to connect to the Internet

[Here is a good article on how I think the PC industry will evolve in order for consumers to reduce their carbon footprint -- BSA]

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/21/technology/21pc.html
The personal computer industry is poised to sell tens of
millions of small, energy-efficient Internet-centric devices.
The new computers, often called netbooks, have scant onboard memory. They
use energy-sipping computer chips. They are intended largely for surfing Web
sites and checking e-mail. The price is small too, with some selling for as
little as $300.
The companies that pioneered the category were small too, like Asus and
Everex, both of Taiwan.
Several makers are taking the low-powered PCs one step further. In the
coming months, they are expected to introduce "net-tops," low-cost versions
of desktop computers intended for Internet access.
A Silicon Valley start-up called CherryPal says it will challenge the idea
that big onboard power is required to allow basic computing functions in the
Internet age. On Monday it plans to introduce a $240 desktop PC that is the
size of a paperback and uses two watts of power compared with the 100 watts
of some desktops.
It wants to take advantage of the trend toward "cloud computing," in which
data is managed and stored in distant servers, not on the actual machine.
Industry analysts say that the emergence of this new class of low-cost,
cloud-centric machines could threaten titans like Microsoft and Intel, or
even H.P. and Dell, because the giants have built their companies on the
notion that consumers want more power and functions built into their next
computer.

It is a market that caught the major computer companies - both hardware and
software - by surprise after Asus, entered the market last year with the
$300 Eee PC. The company thought the device would essentially appeal to the
education market, or as a starter laptop for adolescents, but the interest
has turned out to be broader.
With an emphasis not in on-board applications (like word processing), but
Internet-based ones like Google Docs, the Linux-based Eee PC sold out its
350,000 global inventory. It has been in short supply ever since, said
Jackie Hsu, president of the American division of Asus. Everex has sold
around 20,000 of its CloudBook, which sells for about $350.

The impact of Climate Change on Academic Research

The impact of Climate Change on Academic Research

Cyber-Infrastructure is part of the problem, but it is also part of the
solution.

NSF GreenLight at CAL-IT2 and PROMPT G-NGI initiatives to reduce Greenhouse
Gas (GHG) impact of academic research.



To date most academic researchers have not been particularly concerned about
the impact of climate change on their academic research.  To many
researchers climate change only affects big polluters such as coal plants
and owners of SUVs. Surprisingly few members of the research community
appreciate the dramatic changes that will be required in the next couple of
years, if we hope to slow down the rate of temperature increase in the next
decade (never mind trying to stop or reverse climate change as result of GHG
emission).  Every aspect of our lives will be fundamentally altered as
society starts to recognize the severity of the problem, including, and
especially in the way we carry out academic research.

Governments around the world are already starting to impose carbon
neutrality on public sector institutions such as universities, schools and
hospitals. This strategy is becoming increasing popular with governments as
the public sector is a large part of the economy and therefore a major
contributor to GHG emissions. More importantly it avoids the anguish and
controversy of imposing carbon taxes on the voting public.

University researchers and funding agencies had better be prepared for these
developments. The concept of mandated carbon neutrality will spread like
wildfire once governments around the world discover its many benefits.

Fortunately the academic research community already has many the tools at
hand, not only to be carbon neutral, but perhaps even achieve zero carbon
sustainability.  It is becoming evident that one of the most important
scientific tools for research exploration at our universities is
cyber-infrastructure. Through the use of networks, grids, virtualization and
remote instrumentation and laboratories it is the one research tool that can
help reduce GHG emissions at our campus.

But currently cyber-infrastructure located "on campus" is part of the
problem. At many of our universities it is increasingly a major source of
GHG in its own right through the power it consumes. The beauty and power of
cyber-infrastructure is it removes the restriction that physical facilities
need to be located on campus. With high speed optical networks these same
facilities can be located at zero carbon data centers anywhere in the
country that have easy access to renewable energy. Relocating
cyber-infrastructure to renewable energy sites will be much cheaper than
trying to purchase renewable power locally on campuses in our cities, as the
university will be competing with businesses for that same power.

Two important initiatives are now underway which will help academic
researchers address the challenge of reducing their carbon footprint through
the use of cyber-infrastructure. The first is the PROMPT program for Next
Generation Internet to Reduce Global Warming. This is an international
partnership being led by PROMPT in Montreal with partners from the world
including Australia, The Netherlands, United States, China etc. It is a
research and commercialization initiative to help carry out research and
commercialize the next generation Internet technologies being developed at
our universities such as wireless devices, sensors, instruments and networks
through the use of virtualization and SOA, etc.  The initiative is unique in
that rather than negotiating traditional licenses and royalties, payments
for companies who adopt the technology will be made through the purchase of
carbon credits. PROMPT will also work with universities in helping them
develop research practices and procedures in order to reduce their carbon
footprint.  PROMPT proposes to develop a set of testbeds in Canada and with
its international partners to develop the necessary protocols to test verify
and audit the actual carbon credits in compliance with ISO 14064 that will
be possible through the application of next generation Internet
technologies.

The second important initiative which is also important to the PROMPT
program is to actually measure the energy savings and CO2 reductions of
cyber-infrastructure equipment.  To this end the NSF has awarded a research
team at CAL-IT2 funding for a project called GreenLight. This project,
measures, monitors, and optimizes the energy consumption of large-scale
scientific applications from many different areas. The work enables
inter-disciplinary researchers to understand how to make "green" (i.e.,
energy efficient) decision for IT computation and storage, thus helping to
re-define fundamentals of systems engineering for a transformative concept,
that of green CyberInfrastructure .

Academic research is about to go through a major revolution in the way and
how it is carried out.  Cyber-infrastructure will play a critical role.
Researchers and institutions that are the first to adopt to these new way of
doing research will be the big winners in the future. --BSA]

For additional information:

The Impact of Climate Change on Academic Research
http://www.slideshare.net/bstarn/impact-of-climate-change-on-academic-resear
ch/

PROMPT
www.promptinc.org

Greenlight
http://nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward.do?AwardNumber=0821155

This project, developing an instrument called GreenLight, measures,
monitors, and optimizes the energy consumption of large-scale scientific
applications from many different areas. The work enables inter-disciplinary
researchers to understand how to make ?green? (i.e., energy efficient)
decision for IT computation and storage. Consequently, an experienced team
might be able to make deep and quantitative explorations in advanced
architecture, including alternative circuit fabrics such as Field
Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs), direct-graph execution machines, graphics
processors, solid-state disks, and photonic networking. The enabled
computing and systems research will yield new quantitative data to support
engineering judgments on comparative ?computational work per watt? across
full-scale applications running at-scale computing platforms, thus helping
to re-define fundamentals of systems engineering for a transformative
concept, that of green CyberInfrastructure (CI). Keeping in mind that the IT
industry consumes as much energy (same carbon footprint) as the airline
industry, this project enables five communities of application scientists,
drawn from metagenomics, ocean observing, microscopy, bioinformatics, and
the digital media, to understand how to measure and then minimize energy
consumption, to make use of novel energy/cooling sources, and employ
middleware that automates optimal choice of compute/power strategies. The
research issues addressed include studying the dynamic migration of
applications to virtual machines for power consumption reduction, studying
the migrations of virtual machines to physical machines to achieve network
locality, developing new power/thermal management policies (closed loop,
using feedback from sensors), classifying scientific algorithms in the
context of co-processing hardware such as GPUs and FPGAs, and developing
algorithms for resource sharing/scheduling in heterogeneous platforms. The
full-scale virtualized device, the GreenLight Instrument, will be developed
to measure, monitor, and make publicly available (via service oriented
architecture methodology), real-time sensor outputs, empowering researchers
anywhere to study the energy cost of at-scale scientific computing. Hence,
this work empowers domain application researchers to continue to exploit
exponential improvements in silicon technology, and to compete globally.
Although the IT industry has begun to develop strategies for ?greening?
traditional data centers, the physical reality of modern campus CI currently
involves a complex network of ad hoc and suboptimal energy environments in
departmental facilities. The number of these facilities increases extremely
fast creating campus-wide crisis of space, power, and cooling due to the
value of computational and data intensive approaches to research. This
project addresses these important issues offering the possibility to
improve. Broader Impacts: The project enables researchers to carry-out
quantitative explorations into energy efficient CyberInfrastructure (CI) and
to train the next generation of energy-aware scientists. It enlists graduate
students from five disciplinary projects, involves minority serving
institutions, and is likely to have direct impact on commercial components
of the nation?s CI.

Canada primed for Green Cloud computing

[Some excerpts from Compute Canada article- BSA]

Canada primed for cloud computing: Gartner

http://www.thestandard.com/news/2008/07/06/canada-primed-cloud-computing-gar
tner

A Gartner analyst thinks Canada's natural resources and cooler temperature can help it take advantage of the growing cloud computing trend to provide services and Web applications.
He thinks the country's years of investment in hydro electric power facilities and ambient temperatures will enable data centres to be powered and subsequently cooled. And, he said, the concerns around power and cooling are only getting bigger as Web content grows with video sharing sites like YouTube. Therefore, the country can take its hydro electric infrastructure
to "another level" and extend it to the Web, said Hewitt.

Also facilitating green data center growth is the emergence of server technology like blades and mobile data centres in shipping containers, he noted.

The opportunity, said Hewitt, lies in the federal and provincial governments encouraging Canadian businesses to build data centres in areas where hydro electric power abounds and facilities can be cooled naturally with ambient air.

There's an economic advantage to this. Often, people tend to look to places like Iceland to build data centres that can grant adequate power and cooling, said Hewitt, but distance is a hurdle when undersea fiber cables need to be built. Canada can target the U.S., given its close proximity, as a "potentially large customer," said Hewitt.

Such partnerships with U.S.-based companies, he said, can help grow Canada's infrastructure, job market, and ultimately, its knowledge base around cloud-based computing infrastructure.

Mountain View, Calif.-based Google Inc. has been growing its Web-based services primarily through search and content, but Hewitt believes there is the potential for other applications and services on the cloud. And what is more, the server market is going to grow regardless.

Hewitt doesn't anticipate fuelling data centees with natural resources will be a difficult concept for businesses to grasp. The country's investment in building out hydro electric facilities has been well received, and "I see that as a really good sign."

"Those kinds of initiatives take time and effort," said Hewitt, referring to initiatives in Brazil to build a fuel-independent infrastructure that today doesn't require the import of fossil fuels.

Governments, he said, can play a role and really drive such initiatives. "In the long run, [Canada] can build out a significant set of advantages in providing these services and offering a base for this kind of activity."