Digital Infrastructure in a Carbon Constrained World

[Excellent presentation and paper by Larry Smarr given at a recent Australia-USA leadership event. Some excerpts from the paper below – BSA]

http://www.calit2.net/newsroom/presentations/lsmarr/2008/ppt/AALD_ICT_and_Climate_011509.ppt


Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) presents a uniquely double-edge sword regarding climate change—simultaneously requiring substantial efforts to slow down the growth of its own climate impact, while increasing the use of ICT in other sectors to greatly lower their impact. This white paper provides an overview of these challenges and opportunities, provides some examples of on-going research, and lays out an agenda for American, Australian, and Canadian collaboration.

Proposed Australian, American, Canadian Green ICT Testbed
UCSD and UCI are among the Greenest U.S. campuses. UCSD has undertaken a large number of initiatives to move it rapidly toward a carbon neutral campus[i]. UCI recently won the Best Overall category award in the annual Flex Your Power program[ii], California’s statewide energy efficiency campaign. Among the several hundred applicants, UCI was among just five winners of this level of recognition. This means that Calit2 has a strong foundation on its two home campuses to undertake a wide range of Green initiatives.

Since a key thematic element of Calit2 projects is international engagements, we sought out both Canada and Australia to be partners in establishing an international Green IT testbed. As a first step, on October 27, 2008 a MoU was signed between UC San Diego, University of British Columbia, and Prompt Inc.[iii] during the third Summit of the Canada-California Strategic Innovation Partnership in Montreal, Canada. In one of the first efforts of its kind, these universities in Canada and California are pledging to work together to reduce GHG emissions on their campuses while developing a 'green cyberinfrastructure' – information technology that improves energy efficiency and reduces the impact of emissions on climate change.

In the near term, the institutions agreed to develop methods to share GHG emission data in connection with International Organization for Standardization (ISO) standards for information computer and telecommunications equipment (ISO 14062), as well as baseline emission data for cyberinfrastructure and networks (ISO 14064). These protocols will become much more widely used as those reducing ICT GHG emissions wish to obtain energy credits in “cap and trade” systems. The Calit2 GreenLight data center will be connected to Canadian end users over the CENIC[iv]/Pacific Wave[v]/CANARIE[vi] dedicated optical fiber networks. CANARIE in Canada is studying establishing several research data centers near hydro, wind, and solar powered energy sources, so that a variety of Green Cloud alternatives can be experimented with. Meanwhile, efforts are underway at Calit2 to use DC fuel cell technologies to experiment with feeding modular data centers locally with zero carbon emission energy sources.

With Australia, Calit2 will build on its now extensive relations[vii] with Australian universities, CSIRO, and AARNet to extend in 2009 the UCSD/Canadian Green IT testbed to sites in Australia. Approximately half of the energy consumed by the Internet goes into the core network routers in the core nodes. Therefore, large improvements in network energy efficiency can be obtained if each packet travelling through the Internet passes through as few routers as possible. The primary method to minimize router hops is to employ optical bypass, by which traffic is groomed into wavelengths and/or wavebands which can be diverted around certain routers, avoiding the need for full electronic processing and every router. CUBIN proposes to study this using the dedicated optical infrastructure made available by the AARNet/CENIC testbed.