Environmnetal Impact of Fiber to the Home

[Here is an excellent study by PricewaterhouseCoopers and the European Fiber to the Home council of the environmental benefits of FTTh, taking into account all the CO2 emissions that are produced in the construction and deployment of the fiber, measured against the savings of only two potential applications - tele-commuting and tele-medicine. No surprise, that the greatest amount of CO2 emissions is digging up the ground to bury the fiber. All the more reason to have shared conduit (or poles where available). I suspect the CO2 savings will be significantly greater if they looked at wider range of applications, especially those that promoted the trading of "bits and bandwidth for carbon". The reality is that carbon offsets of tele-commuting and tele-medicine are relatively quite small in the great scheme of things. Since consumers are directly responsible or influence 60% of all CO2 emissions, network applications that enable or encourage consumers to reduce their carbon footprint in these other walks of life will pay much bigger dividends. Thanks to Joeri Van Bogaert for this pointer -- BSA]

http://www.ftthcouncil.eu/documents/Blog%20documents/Christian%20Ollivry%20and%20Philippe%20Osset.pdf

-As a main quantitative finding, the environmental impact of the deployment of a typical FTTH network will be positive in less than 14 years considering only the three selected services • Additional either existing or developing applications will further emphasize these results • Beyond its environmental-friendly aspects, FTTH solutions offer additional social and economical benefits

-If further physical barriers are reduced (ducts access in particular), and full range of services are developing, contributions will be far bigger

50 Environmentally Friendly Apps, Hosts and Resources

[Here is an excellent site listing various zero carbon (and carbon neutral) hosting sites, as well as tools to measure the carbon impact of your blog and/or computer. Thanks to Amy Quinn for this pointer--BSA]


http://www.virtualhosting.com/blog/2008/greendev-50-environmentally-friendly-apps-hosts-and-resources/

$50 million initiative for Next Generation Internet to Reduce Global Warming

[I am very pleased to have contributed my small part to this initiative. As I have long argued there are significant innovation and economic opportunities to use ICT to address the challenge of global warming. Countries and business that are first movers in this field will be the big winners. As such I am pleased to see the participation of some of Canada's largest ICT companies. Some excerpts from the original article from TechMedia -- BSA]

Prompt Inc
http://www.promptquebec.com/index_en.html

Telecom giants support federal bid to study zero-carbon Internet http://www.techmediareports.ca/reports/node/23265

Ericsson, Nortel Networks and Bell Canada Enterprises are among the companies supporting an industry-led plan to promote development of a carbon-neutral Internet. Led by the Quebec-based organization PROMPT Inc., the “Next Generation Internet to Reduce Global Warming” research project has already lined up $8 million in industry contributions and $6 million from the Quebec government. It is now looking to the federal government for an additional $7.5 million to make the initiative national.

“This will be a $15 million program to start … with long-term plans to grow to $50 million,” says Charles Despins, president and CEO of PROMPT (Partenariats de Recherche Orientée en Microélectronique, Photonique et Télécommunications). “It will involve both hardware and software, with wireless playing a huge part. There will be a lot of optical work and a number of new applications.”

[...]

How green was my fiber?

[Olivier Jerphagnon has an excellent blog on ICT and green technologies. As he points out in his most recent posting with the new 100G optical technology and FTTH he state that "fiber optics is a very “green” technology compared to semiconductor electronics. When you look at it more closely, it dissipates a lot less energy than copper based cables and it saves a lot of materials: one single strand of glass can carry as much data as many thousands of copper cables, and it can do over a longer distance without using electronic equipment to regenerate it."

As I mentioned in past postings, I expect future network utilization will be measured on a "bits per carbon" basis rather than "bits per second". With the new 100G wavelength technology, dramatic over provisioning will be the basic design principle. Not only will this make network management much easier, it will also significantly reduce carbon footprint of networks.--BSA]

Olivier Jerphagnon's blog http://greenfrog.typepad.com/weblog/2008/02/fiber-is-green.html


Also there is a new newsletter on Green Data Centers and Internet Business http://www.igigroup.com/nl/pages/business.html

As the demand for datacenter space continues to grow in the foreseeable future, the force for "greening" these datacenters will become stronger. This dynamic market offers great opportunities to companies that offer products that enable this "green" revolution.

The Green Data Centers & Internet Business Newsletter, published monthly, covers the rapid developments in the areas of Green IT, Green Data Centers, Carrier Hotels, Colocation, Web Hosting, Virtualization, and New Internet Business Models. The following topics will be addressed in each issue: Government Regulations, EPA Requirements, New Energy-saving Measures and Technologies, Vendor Initiatives, RFPs, Partnerships and Alliances, Contracts, and New Products. The newsletter provides the necessary marketing and technology information to keep you abreast of new developments and opportunities.

To download a sample issue, visit http://www.igigroup.com/nl/pages/business.html

Green Data Centers - the scary facts

[At this weeks NANOG there was an excellent presentation on the challenges of the electrical power consumption and cooling for modern data centers. Some very scary data and you can see why the ICT industry carbon footprint will easily exceed that of aviation industry -- BSA]

http://www.nanog.org/mtg-0802/presentations/Snowhorn-Power.pdf

By 2008, 50% of today’s Data Centers will have insufficient power and cooling;

By 2010, half of all (Enterprise) Data Centers will have to relocate or outsource applications to another facility.

Some organizations are in the unenviable position of paying more to power and cool a rack a servers than they paid for the rack and the servers themselves.

The Bottleneck of the Internet is the Colo!

ICT and Global Warming - Opportunities for Innovation and Economic Growth

[A draft of my paper on how Information, Computation and Telecommunication (ICT) solutions to mitigate against Global Warming can create opportunities for innovation and economic growth is now available. All comments, suggestions, changes and criticisms most welcome--BSA]

http://docs.google.com/Doc?id=dgbgjrct_2767dxpbdvcf

There has been considerable interest recently about how ICT (Information, Computer, Telecommunications) technologies and how they can address the global challenges of protecting the environment and supporting sustainable development. The subject of ICT and the environment covers a wide range of fields such as sustainable development, using ICT to improve practices in agriculture and forestry, monitoring atmospheric and water pollution, waste management and recycling, improved energy efficiency and, of course ICT as a source of toxic waste in its own right. Although these are all important areas of scientific research and public policy the intent of this report is not to address the various areas on how ICT can address global environment challenges such as the emission of Greenhouse Gases (GHG). Instead the purpose of this brief report is to focus on the opportunities for innovation and economic growth that might arise through the use of ICT to address the challenge of GHG emissions.


To date most approaches for using ICT to reduce GHG emissions have focused on "sackcloth and ashes" approach of reducing energy consumption or emission abatement techniques such as tele-commuting, tele-presence, etc. Various industry consortia and government programs have been set up to promote innovation in these areas. Although these may be worthwhile endeavours, they have been in existence for some time and so far, have made little progress in reducing energy consumption or GHG emissions. Rather than focusing on energy efficiency or abatement techniques this document will hopefully demonstrate that ICT can provide much greater opportunities for innovation and economic growth through a strategy of "zero carbon" for the ICT industry itself and using ICT e-products and e-services as a reward mechanism to encourage consumers and businesses to reduce their overall carbon footprint including heating, transportation, etc

[..]

Consumers control or influence 60% of CO2 emissions

[I highly recommend a report by Confederation of British Industry titled "Climate Change: Everyone's Business". There is a number of excellent statistics and charts on GHG (Green House Gas) emissions. But the one that struck me the most significant is the fact that consumers control or influence 60% of CO2 emissions. Emissions under direct consumer control such as home heating, private car transportation and personal electric consumption constitute 35%. Consumer influenced sectors such as retail, food and drink, agriculture etc constitute another 25%.

Finding ways to encourage consumers to reduce their carbon footprint will have a dramatic impact on overall global GHG emissions. Past attempts at such a strategy have focused on efforts like smart meters, tele-commuting or tele-presence. Although these continue to be worthwhile initiatives, they suffer in their appeal due to externalities such as basic inconvenience, insufficient broadband bandwidth and lack of incentive to counter the clearly inferior technique of interacting with colleagues and workers.

On the other hand, one of the outstanding success of the Internet over the past decade has been the growth in electronic products and services such as music, film, advertising , photography on line searches and so on. Many business processes are also moving to the Internet through such applications as Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) and Web 2.0 applications. The portion of the economy dedicated to e-products and e-services is expected to grow significantly over the coming years. Already multi-billion companies have been built around this business model such as Google, Apple iTunes, etc


Therefore, as I have argued in the past, one area of possible innovation and economic opportunity is to "mash up" these two separate economies and business models to see if new applications and services can be developed to encourage consumers to reduce their own GHG emissions. Companies like Google, Yahoo, Microsoft Amazon, and eBay, with their close consumer relationships could possibly have a significant impact on CO2 emissions through exchanging their e-products and e-services for consumer reduction in carbon. This is not "pie in the sky" thinking but a common marketing tool that already exists with resale gas and electric companies. But surprisingly the concept has not been taken up or implemented by the Internet industry. -- BSA]

Climate Change: Everyone's Business http://www.avtclient.co.uk/climatereport/

Greater energy efficiency may increase CO2 emissions

[I highly recommend a recent a report by Jeff Rubin of CIBC World Markets who documents the Khazzoom-Brookes postulate, also known as the Jevons Paradox where greater energy efficiency may result in increased energy consumption and resultant Green House Gas emissions.

Currently the ICT industry is largely focused on energy efficiency as the primary mechanism for limiting the impact of ICT on global warming. I argue in an upcoming paper that this may be a wrong headed approach (draft copies of this paper are available on request). To avoid the Khazzoom-Brookes postulate it may be necessary for the ICT industry to focus on a "zero carbon" strategy as opposed to energy efficiency. It is my belief that the ICT has the technological ability to target a zero carbon strategy through the use of next generation optical Internet networks linking zero carbon data centers, hosting clouds and grids using latest Web 2.0 and SOA applications. -- BSA]

Does Energy Efficiency Save Energy? http://research.cibcwm.com/economic_public/download/snov07.pdf

"Much is being banked on the notion that
improvements in energy efficiency will be the
answer to both oil depletion and greenhouse
gas emissions. But is it a realistic economic
premise that technological change can
reduce energy usage, and by implication, its
carbon trail?

The OPEC oil shocks spawned huge
improvements in energy efficiency, particularly
insofar as oil was concerned. But three
decades later, we find that the net effect of
all of those efficiency initiatives has been to
increase the world’s appetite for crude. While
oil per unit of GDP has fallen impressively in
large energy-consuming economies like the
United States, total oil consumption, and
indeed, total energy consumption, continue
to grow by leaps and bounds. The increase
in energy usage has dwarfed the gains in
economic efficiency. Hence, instead of
capping energy demand, what we observe
is that improvements in energy efficiency
lead to ever and ever-greater levels of energy
usage.

Following the OPEC oil shocks, a few renegade
economists argued that improvements
in energy efficiency would perversely
lead to increases in energy demand. The
Khazzoom-Brookes postulate, as it has
come to be known, is based on the standard
substitution and income effects that result
from any change in the price of a good. The
standard theory of the consumer argues
that a reduction in energy costs (due to
improvements in energy efficiency) can
lead to an increase, not a decline, in energy
demand. Moreover, to the extent that
overall economic growth would benefit from
cheaper energy prices, there is an additional
macroeconomic stimulus to energy demand,
all contributing to a very powerful rebound
effect. The postulate suggests that energy
intensity targets, commonplace in most
countries’ energy strategies, are effectively
incapable of limiting future growth in
either energy-demand growth or carbon
emissions.

To date, there has only been one sure-fire
way of reducing energy consumption—
shrink the economy. But even small
reductions in the level of global GDP would
lever huge increases in human hardship.
But at the same time, reducing energy
consumption per unit of GDP has not been a
viable policy option. From gasoline demand
to the energy requirements of the average
American home, the legacy of energyefficiency
improvements is ever-greater
energy consumption (see pages 4-7).

In the past, the efficiency paradox has
been used as an argument against efforts
to promote greater energy efficiency and
conservation. That is not our intention here.
On the contrary, for a world facing the
twin challenges of oil depletion and global
climate change, there has never been a
more urgent need for both. But in order for
total efficiency to actually curb total energy
usage, as opposed to energy intensity,
consumers must be kept from reaping the
benefits of those initiatives in ever-greater
energy consumption. Otherwise, energy
usage will be the beneficiary of our best
efforts towards greater energy efficiency.
The road to hell is paved with good
intentions.

Upcoming Conferences and Studies on ICT and Global Warming

[Interest in ICT and its impact on global warming seems to have exploded in the last 6 months. There is a number of upcoming reports and conferences on the subject that I would highly recommend. Most of these events and studies are looking at energy efficiency and carbon abatement (tele-presence, tele-commuting, etc) as the primary mechanisms how ICT can mitigate effects of Green House Gas (GHG) emissions. But I don't know how many of them are taking a systemic view and looking at issues of Jevons paradox or the issue of "zero carbon" versus "carbon neutrality". Also I don’t think any of these studies are addressing the new business and economic opportunities that may be possible with a zero carbon ICT strategy that may result in a virtuous feedback cycle to further stimulate GHG reductions in other sectors of society. It is my belief that there are huge economic and business opportunities with a zero carbon ICT strategy which will fundamentally reshape ICT industry, broadband, etc and create new wealth and employment to first mover countries and businesses--BSA]


http://www.itu.int/ITU-T/worksem/climatechange/call.html
Call for papers, speakers and contributions
ITU Symposia on ICTs and Climate Change
Kyoto, Japan, 15-16 April 29008
London, UK, 17-18 June 2008
Deadline: 29 February 2008

Since 1970, the production of greenhouse gases has risen by more than 70 per cent, and this is having a global effect in warming the planet, causing changing weather patterns, rising sea-levels, desertification, shrinking ice cover and other worrying long-term effects. The UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) foresees a further rise in average global temperatures of between 1.4 and 5.8° centigrade by 2030.

Climate change is a concern for all of humanity and requires efforts on the part of all sectors of society, including the information and communication technologies (ICTs) sector. Although ICTs contribute only an estimated 2.5 per cent of total greenhouse gases, this share is set to grow as usage of ICTs expands globally, growing at a faster rate than the general economy. ICTs are thus part of the cause of global warming, but they can also be part of the solution, for instance through the promotion of carbon displacement technologies. ICTs are also vital in monitoring the spread of global warming.

As part of a major new initiative on the overall topic of ICTs and climate change, ITU is organizing two Symposia on ICTs and Climate Change. The first will be held in Kyoto, Japan 15-16 April 2008, hosted by MIC Japan, and the second in London, UK, on 17-18 June, hosted by BT. Initial proposals developed in Kyoto will be finalized in London. These symposia will bring together key specialists in the field, from top decision-makers to engineers, designers, planners, government officials, regulators, standards experts and others.

To contribute to this work, you are invited to submit an abstract, of maximum 300 words, for a paper or presentation which is relevant to one of more of the topics below.



Canadian Green IT Forum: You, Me and Green IT Conference http://www.idc.com/getdoc.jsp?containerId=IDC_P16849

Apr 09-10, 2008
Toronto, Ontario Canada


Canadian Telecom Summit
Green IT
http://www.gstconferences.com/conference_program?



http://www.gesi.org/media/press-releases/new-global-climate-change-study-focuses-on-ict-industry.html

New Global Climate Change Study Focuses on ICT Industry

The ICT sector currently accounts for less than two per cent of global greenhouse gas emissions, though this number could more than double by 2020. The independent research study will assess current carbon impacts of the ICT sector and analyse ICTs’ role in catalyzing transformation to a low-carbon economy.

The study will quantify the direct and indirect impacts of computing, telecoms, software and services, and assess business opportunities going forward to 2020. The study will commence in November 2007 and will report in March 2008.

In addition to identifying ways to limit direct impacts of the sector, the study will explore the opportunities for ICTs to drive efficiencies both in developed countries and in emerging economies, where growth of ICTs is over 10 per cent.

Steve Howard, CEO of The Climate Group says: “The ICT sector is rapidly growing and energy dependent. If the sector gets it right, it can achieve sustainable growth and deliver smart solutions that will help enable the low carbon economy.”

Luis Neves, Chair of the GeSI initiative, says: “IT and communications companies are looking for the best way to take responsibility for the future. This study will provide the definitive scientific evidence we need to choose the right course and play a positive role in climate change solutions. This is an excellent opportunity for the IT industry to examine how the application of IT can, not only deliver energy savings and carbon reduction, but do so in a way that drives even greater economic growth and productivity.”

Balancing the wider benefits against the direct impacts of the industry, covering both developed and emerging economies, the study aims to:

* Deliver the first globally comprehensive picture of direct and indirect carbon emissions of telecoms, computing, services and software.
* Define common themes and issues across the ICT lifecycle, identifying critical trends, scenarios and impact assessments for the ICT sector to 2020.
* Create a ‘road map’ to allow the ICT sector to act now on reducing global energy usage and greenhouse gas emissions.

More information

For more information contact:

Tom Howard-Vyse, The Climate Group
Head of Media, Europe
Dir: +44 (0) 207 960 2991, Mob: +44 (0) 7800 933831 thoward-vyse@theclimategroup.org

Joan Sherlock, Global e-Sustainability Initiative
Head of Communications
Dir: +1 650 948 2544, Mob: +1 650 400 1336
press@gesi.org

Conference on Green Cyber-infrastructure on Campus

[It is good to see that companies like Sun are starting to see the importance of dealing with CO2 footprint of the computational infrastructure on campus. There are now companies that offer offset dollars, as much as $1 million, to universities if they eliminate their cyber-infrastructure CO2 footprint through use of clouds and/or virtualization. The upcoming Canadian Telecom Conference will also have a entire day's track devoted to Green IT. Thanks to Michael Sims for this pointer--BSA]

Canadian Telecom Summit track on Green IT http://www.gstconferences.com/conference_program?

Sun Conference on Eco-computing http://www.events-at-sun.com/wwerc08/track2.html#speakers

WWERC Track #2:
Eco-Computing on Campus
As community participation on the network grows, so does its impact on the environment—and that affects the bottom line. Energy costs for universities have jumped 27% percent since 2005 as the campus datacenter faces heavier demands that are pushing the limits of power, space, and cooling. Meanwhile, institutions are also increasingly concerned about the environmental impact of their datacenters and are under pressure to reduce emissions, energy consumption and e-waste.

So where is the green in green? At the 2008 ERC, you'll hear from leaders in industry, pioneers in education, and experts at Sun on why eco-computing is both important and beneficial to higher education, and the opportunities available today to make a difference.

Note: All speakers subject to change.

Speakers

* Dave Douglas, Vice President, Eco Responsibility, Sun Microsystems
* Paul Frankel, Director, Aquillian Investments
* Larry Penley, President, Colorado State University System

How Google can save the planet

[As many of you who have been following my Green Broadband Blog I have long argued that there are 2 approaches on how the Internet can help reduce global warming. The first and most obvious is reducing the direct energy consumption of the Internet and ICT (information, communications, technology) industry itself. There is a lot of good work in this area with more energy efficient computers, green grids, zero carbon data centers and so forth. Google and other companies like IBM are exemplary corporate citizens in this regard. But even if the entire Internet industry reduced its carbon footprint to zero, the impact would be fairly negligible on the overall global CO2 output.

The second and more important benefit of how companies like Google, Yahoo, Microsoft Amazon, eBay, etc can have a significant impact on CO2 emissions is through trading "bits and bandwidth for carbon". This is not "pie in the sky" thinking but a common marketing tool that already exists with resale gas and electric companies. But surprisingly the concept has not been taken up or implemented by the Internet industry.

Many gas and electric resale companies have a number of product offerings where customers can get free hot water tanks, furnaces, appliances and other services if they sign up for long term contracts with a fixed price for their rate of energy consumption. Direct Energy for example offers 300 free minutes of long distance per month for those customers who sign up for a 5 year contract of a fixed guaranteed utilization price for gas and/or electricity. With a fixed price per utilization (e.g. 10 cents per kilowatt/hour) customers are free to reduce their overall energy consumption and yet still enjoy the benefits of the free service or product. As far as I know none of the electric gas resale companies have positioned these offerings as a way for consumers to reduce CO2 emissions.

Companies like Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and others have been focusing on the advertising market as their main source of Internet revenue through "click-ad" and products like Ad-Sense etc. While the innovations in this market have been spectacular, they do have limited total revenue potential. The entire advertising market - radio, TV, Internet - is very small part of the overall economy. Even with 100% capture of this market it will not enable the next billion dollars of revenues for companies like Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, eBay, Amazon, etc

But imagine if you could combine the power of click ads and on-line purchases with electric and gas re-sale products and services. Imagine a real time Internet service where customers could buy all sorts of products and services over the network where the cost of the product and/or service is included as part of their overall electric/gas utilization rate (but NOT consumption).

For example a customer could click on an iTunes song and rather than being billed on their credit card, the charge instead would be applied to their electric utilization rate increasing it for example from 10 cents per kilowatt/hour to 10.1 cents per kilowatt/hour for the next 5 days, or something to that effect.

Customers would be encouraged to reduce their energy consumption during that period, so that the net cost of such a purchase could very well end up being zero. The purveyors of the products and services, and the electric/gas resellers can protect and guarantee their profits from the sale of the product or service through forward purchases of energy or averaging out the base utilization rate.

The same marketing concept can be applied to automobiles as well where customers with leases or service plans agree to pay a "utilization" fee based on their mileage they put on the vehicle. Products and services such as music, cell phone charge, congestion charges, etc could be charged to this utilization fee. Again the less the consumer drives the car, the more they benefit in terms of effective zero next cost for the product and/or service.

In many ways trading of "Bits and bandwidth for carbon" is in effect a carbon tax. But rather than governments applying such a tax where there are no direct benefits to the consumer, this mechanism will have the same effect of encouraging consumers to reduce their carbon footprint, but where they are directly rewarded for this behaviour.

Internet companies like Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, eBay, Amazon would have a new marketing tool and a potential source of significant new revenue. At the same time they can be leaders in addressing the biggest environmental challenge facing this planet.

Virtually anyone can become an electric/gas reseller. It is important to note that you DON'T have to be a utility to be an electric/gas reseller. The licensing costs imposed by most states and provinces are less than $2000.00. Throughout North America and the rest of the world there are wholesale energy markets where licensed resellers can purchase energy for resale to consumers and businesses. Most utilities are obligated by law to do the billing and customer collection on behalf of any licensed reseller and then remit monthly the energy charges to the reseller directly. This means that any small innovative Internet companies who want to institute "bits and bandwidth for carbon" marketing schemes can easily become energy resellers and get into the market without huge costs of billing and collection.

For more details see http://green-broadband.blogspot.com

Can the Internet save the Planet

[Some excerpts from excellent article in Information Week article. There are also some excellent pointers to other resources on ICT and global warming -- BSA]

http://www.informationweek.com/news/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=205601559&pgno=1&queryText=



Solar arrays and wind farms grab all the green technology attention, but the Internet is quietly providing ways to save energy.

By Richard Martin
InformationWeek
January 12, 2008 12:01 AM (From the January 14, 2008 issue)

Last October, environmentally conscious Netheads everywhere got some excellent news. The pervasive use of broadband Internet connections and the tools and practices they enable could reduce greenhouse gas emissions by some 1 billion tons over the next decade, according to the American Consumer Institute. Widespread adoption of broadband in the United States alone would cut energy use by the equivalent of 11% of annual oil imports, the group says.

Clearly, though, when it comes to energy use, the Web is both a crusader and a culprit. Server farms and data centers burn mountains of CO2, much of it to keep machines cool. But now a new crop of companies and thinkers is trying to make the Internet "carbon neutral" and find ways to use Web-based technologies to reduce worldwide energy consumption through "demand-response" schemes that give energy consumers more direct control over their energy use.

Internet-enabled capabilities like telecommuting, e-commerce, teleconferencing, and distance learning that have been around for decades are expected to play an increasing role in cutting energy consumption--reducing air travel and the need for warehouses, trips to the mall, and even malls themselves. The American Consumer Institute projects that telecommuting alone will cut CO2 emissions by more than a half million tons over the next decade. Overall, the Internet economy could help reduce growth in greenhouse gas output by 67% over the next several years, the study says, citing data from the Lawrence Berkeley National Lab.

[..]
St. Arnaud believes that Internet companies can slow global warming in two ways: by reducing the energy use of the routers and servers that make up the Internet's backbone, and by "bits-and-bandwidth for carbon" trading schemes that would provide incentives for individuals and companies to reduce their carbon footprints in return for free or reduced-rate broadband connections or downloadable music and films.

Legendary Silicon Valley investors like John Doerr of Kleiner Perkins and Vinod Khosla, who made their fortunes from Internet-based technology, are now focused on slowing global warming, channeling billions of dollars into technologies such as solar power and wind farms.

[..]
Couple the potential of Internet-related technologies with these investment engines and the optimists among us might foresee a significant dent in the energy crisis. But such pronouncements mask the inconvenient truth that the Internet hogs a great deal of power, particularly for big server farms on Google- and Amazon-like scales.

[..]

Zero Carbon Data Centers being deployed by Google and others

[There has been a number of recent announcements of companies planning to deploy zero carbon data centers. Previously I mentioned the initiative in Iceland in partnership with Hibernia cable

http://green-broadband.blogspot.com/2007/12/new-undersea-cable-to-iceland-to-enable.html

Here is an excellent presentation by Bastion Host which is planning on deploying a renewable energy data center in rural Nova Scotia which will also take advantage of Hibernia Cable and the much shorter great circle route between North America and Europe. The other advantage of locating a data center in Nova Scotia and Newfoundland is the close proximity to US markets. But, as well, being in Canada enterprise customers are largely protected from the prying eyes of the US Patriot Act.

http://www.bastionhost.com/BHslides/BHweb_edit.html


Google considers data center in Lithuania http://www.reuters.com/article/ousiv/idUSL0767120020080107

VILNIUS (Reuters) - Web search company Google Inc. is considering building a data center in Lithuania, business daily Verslo zinios reported on Monday.

The government has proposed locating the centre near a hydro power plant in Kaisiadoriu district, central Lithuania, and the negotiations over investment were to be closed soon, the paper said. [...]

Thanks to viboons for his posting on Internet evolution http://www.internetevolution.com/messages.asp?piddl_msgthreadid=179239&piddl_msgid=152647#msg_152647

--BSA]

Infrastructure as a web service to reduce carbon emissions

[I received several interesting responses on my recent posting on Internet Evolution on Infrastructure as a web service (IaaS). Enabling the IT infrastructure as a Web service allows administrators to virtualize not only computing resources but also a variety of LAN and WAN network hardware and storage devices including routers, switches, application servers, etc.

http://www.internetevolution.com/author.asp?section_id=506&doc_id=142359

As Paul Whyte reports in his response "there is a company in Indianapolis who are pioneering efforts in this direction:http://www.bluelock.com). Going through their website makes interesting reading as they catalogue the financial, technical and business benefits of IaaS."

Eoin Kenney from Heanet comments that "infrastructure as web service ..is happening from a whole bunch of different directions. For example, Amazon have already provide infrastructure web services and you can build your own APN [Articulated Private Network] using Amazon web services as
building blocks.... Putting all these web services together, storage, bandwidth etc and you get your own APN. Its only a matter of time before some student starts providing a simple little GUI that will do all of this for you.

Alan Judge of Amazon gave a great presentation at the recent HEAnet conference on how researchers and educators can use Amazon Ec2/S3 in IaaS applications. A good example is the UC Santa Barbara program: Scalable Internet Services. Course materials, lessons learned, and projects all available online: http://courses.voneicken.com/ucsb-cs290f-fa06

Finally the New Scientist article " Can we stop the internet destroying our planet?" brings this all together by pointing out the new "Green Grid" initiative which is a partnership of Microsoft, IBM, Sun and Dell to explore how data centres can be made more energy efficient to support these new IaaS applications and services.

The New Scientist also reports that IBM "...pledged to invest $1 billion annually in a project called Big Green, which aims to double computing capacity at IBM's data centres without increasing energy consumption.
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."

http://technology.newscientist.com/channel/tech/mg19726372.700-can-we-stop-the-internet-destroying-our-planet.html

The ultimate goal as I have reported in the past is to build zero carbon data centers in order to assist companies and individuals to relocate their energy consuming computers and servers to these facilities. More importantly zero carbon data centers will enable the next generation of high speed Internet applications that will be used to trade bits and bandwidth for carbon.

For more information please see my Green Broadband/IT blog at http://green-broadband.blogspot.com
--BSA]

How R&E optical networks can help reduce CO2 emissions

[I am prompted to write this blog by the recent decision of the BCnet board to adopt a Green Broadband strategy. As far as I know the British Columbia research and education optical network is the first in the world to adopt such a program as part and parcel of their disaster recovery and virtualization planning. Not only will this initiative have enormous benefits for the BC university research community it will also provide significant advantages to BC businesses and government.

BCnet and other optical R&E networks are starting to realize that they can play a critical role in helping mitigate the impact of CO2 emissions from cyber-infrastructure and other carbon intensive facilities on university campuses.

Many universities are spending millions of dollars on building new facilities to host the demand for new cyber-infrastructure equipment that is essential to the future of scientific discovery. A big part of the cost of such facilities is the new electrical and air conditioning systems required to power and cool these systems respectively, which of course has a large carbon footprint.

But rather than building carbon intensive data centers on campuses, some leading edge universities are starting to look at relocating these systems to zero carbon data centers which may be at distant sites off campus, or even sharing these facilities through grids across several campuses. Not only does this reduce the carbon impact of such systems, it also provides for disaster recovery in the event of major disruptions such as earthquakes, fires, etc

Many university computer clusters are often under utilized. But by sharing these facilities though grids and other means their carbon impact can be significantly reduced. And in some cases universities, Virtual Organizations or R&E networks can earn real dollars through carbon offsets, by sharing these facilities and increasing their overall utilization.

Of course, all of this is only possible, if the universities are attached to a high speed optical research network. Relocating or sharing cyber-infrastructure systems off campus only works if researchers and students can still have the same performance and throughput as if these facilities were located next door on campus. This can only be achieved by a high speed optical network.

And yet collaboration and sharing of cyber-infrastructure is often a tough sell to many researchers, even though many recognize it is the future of science and research. The inertia in the way they currently carry out their research can be a powerful disincentive to move to the world of cyber-infrastructure. But saving the climate may provide a more compelling moral incentive to these researchers to encourage collaborate and share these cyber-infrastructure facilities in the exciting new world of eScience and eResearch. So universities and research networks like BCnet who implement green broadband strategies can help accelerate their researchers to move to the world of cyber-infrastructure and leading edge science--BSA]

Future Internet could reduce todays PSTN CO2 emissions by 40%

[The ITU has put out an excellent report called ICTs and Climate Change. Highly recommended reading and further support to my belief that the ICT industry can reduce its own emissions to zero but also enable other traditional carbon heavy sectors of society to reduce their carbon footprint through "bits and bandwidth for carbon" trading schemes such as free fiber to the home, free mobile telephony, and other free eProducts and eServices. Some excerpts --BSA]

http://www.itu.int/ITU-T/newslog/PermaLink,guid,9ba8aa93-e90d-4e9b-859c-b94b6d57c424.aspx


Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) are undoubtedly part of the cause of global warming as witnessed, for instance, by the millions of computer screens that are left switched on overnight in offices around the world.

But ICTs can also be part of a solution. This Technology Watch briefing report looks at the potential role that ICTs play at different stages of the process, from contributing to global warming (section 1), to monitoring it (2), to mitigating its impact on the most vulnerable parts of the globe (3), to developing long term solutions, both directly in the ICT sector and in other sectors like energy, transport, buildings etc (4). The final sections look at what ITU-T is already doing in this field (5) strategic options (6), and the campaign for a climate-neutral UN (7).

A major focus of ITU’s work in recent years has been on Next-Generation Networks (NGN), which are expected by some commentators to reduce energy consumption by 40 per cent compared to today’s PSTN

The telecommunications industry is currently undergoing a major revolution as it migrates from today’s separate networks (for voice, mobile, data etc) to a single, unified IP-based next-generation network . The savings will be achieved in a number of ways: • A significant decrease in the number of switching centres required. For instance, BT’s 21st Century Network (21CN) will require only 100-120 metropolitan nodes compared with its current 3’000 locations; • More tolerant climatic range specifications for switching locations, which are raised from 35 degrees (between 5 and 40°C) to 50 degrees (between -5 and 45°C). As a result, the switching sites can be fresh-air cooled in most countries rather than requiring special air conditioning.

A carbon negative Internet - Freedom to Connect Conference

[I encourage all those who are interested in the issues of global warming and how the Internet call help mitigate against the greatest challenge of our lifetime to attend the upcoming Freedom to Connect Conference in Washington DC --BSA]

http://freedom-to-connect.net/

Announcing F2C: Freedom to Connect 2008!
March 31 & April 1, 2008, Washington, DC

The theme of F2C: Freedom to Connect 2008 is "The NetHeads Come to Washington."

This year there will be a second theme at F2C, "A Carbon-Negative Internet." We will devote at least one session, and perhaps a half day, to exploring the impacts of applications like user monitored edge-based control of energy usage, cloud routing of compute-intensive operations to geographical locations with renewable energy, peer-to-peer automobile traffic optimization, and the putative trade-off between physical presence and virtual presence.

Conventional wisdom is that NetHeads have sharply different interests than telephone companies and cable companies. This is mostly true, yet both need a robust, sustainable Internet. It is in the long-term interests of neither to kill the 'Net's success factors. Further, conventional wisdom is that NetHeads are represented by public advocacy groups like Free Press, Public Knowledge, and the New America Foundation and aligned with Internet companies like Google, Amazon, and eBay. Again this is directionally correct, but the diversity of the NetHead community ensures divergence on key issues.

Biology teaches that diversity is good. Most business practices teach the opposite. Washington hears much from the telcos and cablecos, and much from the Internet companies and the public advocacy groups, but way too little from the NetHeads themselves. F2C 2008 will provide a platform for NetHead voices and a forum for dialog among all parties with a stake in the future of an open, sustainable, state-of-the-art Internet.

So far (this is changing rapidly so check back here often) F2C speakers include:

* Tim Wu, Professor, Columbia Law School, Author of Wireless Carterphone (2007)
* Tom Evslin, founder ITXC, founder AT&T WorldNet, blogger, author, telecom activist
* Reed Hundt, former chairman of the FCC
* Andrew Rasiej, co-founder, Personal Democracy Forum
* Bill St. Arnaud, Chief Research Officer CANARIE and green-broadband blogger
* Brad Templeton, Chairman, Electronic Frontier Foundation
* Katrin Verclas, former Exec. Director NTEN, MobileActive blogger.
* Robin Chase, founder of ZipCar, entrepreneuse and environmentalist.

New undersea cable to Iceland to enable zero carbon data centres

[Hibernia Atlantic is planning to build a cable from Ireland to Iceland to attack the data centre opportunity that cheap geothermal and hydro Icelandic power presents. To my mind this is a classic example of the new business opportunities that are possible by first mover countries and companies who want to address the challenge of global warming. Newfoundland and Labrador in Canada is similarly well poised with their new undersea fiber networks to Nova Scotia and Greenland combined with the presences of renewable hydro electric energy at Churchill Falls. Newfoundland and Iceland could be the logical location for new zero carbon data centers for North America and Europe. Thanks to Rod Beck for this pointer --BSA]


http://www.hiberniaatlantic.com/documents/8607-IcelandPR-JSAFinal.pdf

HIBERNIA ATLANTIC WILL CONSTRUCT A NEW
SUBMARINE FIBER OPTIC CABLE CONNECTING ICELAND
DIRECTLY TO NORTH AMERICA AND EUROPE
THIS HISTORIC NETWORK BUILD MARKS ANOTHER “INDUSTRY FIRST”
FOR THE DIVERSE TRANS-ATLANTIC CABLE PROVIDER
BOSTON, MA & NEW YORK, NY – August 9, 2007

– Hibernia Atlantic, the only diverse
TransAtlantic submarine transport cable provider, today announces its plan to construct a brand new undersea fiber optic cable system connecting Iceland to its northern Atlantic submarine cable system. Hibernia Atlantic will deploy a branching unit off its existing northern cable, giving Iceland direct connectivity to North America, Ireland, London, Amsterdam and the rest of continental Europe. The new cable link will provide connectivity to Iceland at 192 X 10 Gbps Ethernet wavelengths, the only one of its kind in the region. This allows for communications traffic from Iceland to go either East or West, with direct access to 42 cities and 52 network Points of Presence (PoPs) and the ability to steer traffic around major metropolitan areas and bypass traditional backhaul routes. Hibernia Atlantic projects the system will become fully operational for customer traffic in the Fall of 2008.

“Many server-intensive customers who require reliable and inexpensive power for collocation services are looking to Iceland as their most cost-effective solution,” states Ken Peterson, Chairman of Hibernia Atlantic’s Board of Directors and the Chairman of Columbia Ventures Corporation, Hibernia’s parent company. “Iceland has an abundance of inexpensive geothermal and hydroelectric power that makes it attractive for many industries. The country is also committed to one day becoming entirely reliable on renewable energy sources, thereby making it an attractive and fertile place to do business.”

“Over a hundred years ago, Iceland marked a milestone in the history of its telecommunications,” continues Bjarni K. Thorvardarson, Hibernia Atlantic’s CEO and Icelandic native. “A submarine telegraph cable was laid from Scotland through the Faroe Islands to the East Coast of Iceland. That same year, a telegraph and telephone line was laid to the capital Reykjavik, thereby ending the country's isolation. Today, more than a century later, Hibernia is proud to announce its plans to build an upgraded submarine cable providing 10 Gbps Ethernet connectivity to Iceland, a major improvement on current capacity, and the addition of yet another key location in the growing list of Hibernia Atlantic operations and Points of Presence. We are pleased and excited to add this segment to our already healthy cable system.”

This new cable provides Iceland much needed diversity from its existing infrastructure. Currently, the only cable with available capacity is Farice, a submarine cable system connecting Iceland and the Faroe Islands to Scotland. Upon completion of the new Hibernia Atlantic cable, which will offer 192 X 10 Gbps wavelengths, Hibernia Atlantic will supply Iceland with a major upgrade in capacity, efficiency, reliability and first-to-market Ethernet services. Hibernia Atlantic will also serve as another redundant option to connect to North America, Ireland and other major European cities.

For the complete Hibernia Atlantic network map and service offerings, videocasts and the Hibernia Atlantic Blog, please visit www.hiberniaatlantic.com. If you have additional questions on network capacity, please email eric.gutshall@hiberniaatlantic.com.
# # #
About Hibernia Atlantic:
The Hibernia Atlantic is a privately held, US-owned, TransAtlantic submarine cable that provides “Security through Diversity” to European and US customers. Hibernia offers wholesale capacity prices, unparalleled support, flexibility and service while delivering customized solutions for its customers. Hibernia Atlantic’s redundant rings include access to Dublin, Manchester, London, Amsterdam, Brussels, Frankfurt, Paris, New York City, White Plains, Stamford, Newark, Ashburn, Boston, Albany, Halifax, Montreal and more. Hibernia provides dedicated Ethernet and optical level service up to GigE, 10G and LanPhy wavelengths and traditional sonet/SDH services. Hibernia Atlantic’s cutting-edge network technology allows enterprise customers, carriers and wholesale customers reliable, next-generation bundled services at affordable prices. For more information or a complete network map, please visit www.hiberniaatlantic.com. For Hibernia Atlantic media enquiries, please contact: Jaymie Scotto & Associates 866.695.3629 pr@jaymiescotto.com

Cloud Routing, Cloud Computing, Global Warming and Cyber-Infrastructure

[To my mind "cloud computing" and "cloud routing" are technologies that will not only radically alter cyber-infrastructure but also enable the Internet and ICT community to address the serious challenges of global warming.

Cloud computing allows us to locate computing resources anywhere in the world. No longer does the computer (whether it is a PC or supercomputer) have to be collocated with a user or institution. With high bandwidth optical networks it is now possible to collocate cloud computing resources with renewable energy sites in remote locations.

Cloud routing will change the Internet in much the same way as cloud computing has changed computation and cyber-infrastructure. Today's Internet topologies are largely based on locating routers and switches with the shortest geographical reach to end users. But once again low cost high bandwidth optical networks allow us to distribute routing and forwarding to renewable energy sites at remote locations. In effect we are scaling up something that we routinely do today on the Internet with such concepts as remote peering and backhauling. By breaking up the Internet forwarding table into small blocks on /16 or finer boundaries we can also distribute the forwarding and routing load across a "cloud" of many thousands of PCs instead of specialized routers.

The other big attraction of "cloud" services, whether routing or computational is their high resiliency. This is essential if you want to collocate these services at remote renewable energy site around the world. Renewable energy sites, by their very nature are going to be far less reliable and stable. So "highly disruptive tolerant" routing and data replication services are essential

Some excerpts from postings on Gordon Cooks Arch-econ list--BSA]

For more information on cloud routing:

http://green-broadband.blogspot.com/2007/12/new-internet-architectures-to-re
duce.html

http://www.canarie.ca/canet4/library/recent/BELnet_Technical_presentation_De
c_11_2007.ppt
For more information on this item please visit my blog at
http://green-broadband.blogspot.com/ or http://billstarnaud.blogspot.com
-------------------------------------------

For more information on Next Generation Internet and reducing Global Warming http://green-broadband.blogspot.com



http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/toc/07_52/B4064magazine.htm

Google and the Wisdom of Clouds
A lofty new strategy aims to put incredible computing power in the hands of many by Stephen Baker

[...]
What is Google's cloud? It's a network made of hundreds of thousands, or by some estimates 1 million, cheap servers, each not much more powerful than the PCs we have in our homes. It stores staggering amounts of data, including numerous copies of the World Wide Web. This makes search faster, helping ferret out answers to billions of queries in a fraction of a second. Unlike many traditional supercomputers, Google's system never ages. When its individual pieces die, usually after about three years, engineers pluck them out and replace them with new, faster boxes. This means the cloud regenerates as it grows, almost like a living thing.

A move towards clouds signals a fundamental shift in how we handle information. At the most basic level, it's the computing equivalent of the evolution in electricity a century ago when farms and businesses shut down their own generators and bought power instead from efficient industrial utilities. Google executives had long envisioned and prepared for this change. Cloud computing, with Google's machinery at the very center, fit neatly into the company's grand vision, established a decade ago by founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page: "to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible

ONE-WAY STREET
For small companies and entrepreneurs, clouds mean opportunity-a leveling of the playing field in the most data-intensive forms of computing. To date, only a select group of cloud-wielding Internet giants has had the resources to scoop up huge masses of information and build businesses upon it.

This status quo is already starting to change. In the past year, Amazon has opened up its own networks of computers to paying customers, initiating new players, large and small, to cloud computing. Some users simply park their massive databases with Amazon. Others use Amazon's computers to mine data or create Web services. In November, Yahoo opened up a cluster of computers-a small cloud-for researchers at Carnegie Mellon University. And Microsoft
(MSFT) has deepened its ties to communities of scientific researchers by providing them access to its own server farms. As these clouds grow, says Frank Gens, senior analyst at market research firm IDC, "A whole new community of Web startups will have access to these machines. It's like they're planting Google seeds." Many such startups will emerge in science and medicine, as data-crunching laboratories searching for new materials and drugs set up shop in the clouds.

Many [scientists] were dying for cloud know how and computing power-especially for scientific research. In practically every field, scientists were grappling with vast piles of new data issuing from a host of sensors, analytic equipment, and ever-finer measuring tools. Patterns in these troves could point to new medicines and therapies, new forms of clean energy. They could help predict earthquakes. But most scientists lacked the machinery to store and sift through these digital El Dorados. "We're drowning in data," said Jeannette Wing, assistant director of the National Science Foundation.

All sorts of business models are sure to evolve. Google and its rivals could team up with customers, perhaps exchanging computing power for access to their data. They could recruit partners into their clouds for pet projects, such as the company's clean energy initiative, announced in November. With the electric bills at jumbo data centers running upwards of $20 million a year, according to industry analysts, it's only natural for Google to commit both brains and server capacity to the search for game-changing energy breakthroughs.

What will research clouds look like? Tony Hey, vice-president for external research at Microsoft, says they'll function as huge virtual laboratories, with a new generation of librarians-some of them human-"curating" troves of data, opening them to researchers with the right credentials. Authorized users, he says, will build new tools, haul in data, and share it with far-flung colleagues. In these new labs, he predicts, "you may win the Nobel prize by analyzing data assembled by someone else." Mark Dean, head of IBM's research operation in Almaden, Calif., says that the mixture of business and science will lead, in a few short years, to networks of clouds that will tax our imagination. "Compared to this," he says, "the Web is tiny. We'll be laughing at how small the Web is." And yet, if this "tiny" Web was big enough to spawn Google and its empire, there's no telling what opportunities could open up in the giant clouds.


================

December 13, 2007, 4:07PM EST text size: T T

Online Extra: The Two Flavors of Google
A battle could be shaping up between the two leading software platforms for cloud computing, one proprietary and the other open-source by Stephen Baker

Why are search engines so fast? They farm out the job to multiple processors. Each task is a team effort, some of them involving hundreds, or even thousands, of computers working in concert. As more businesses and researchers shift complex data operations to clusters of computers known as clouds, the software that orchestrates that teamwork becomes increasingly vital. The state of the art is Google's in-house computing platform, known as MapReduce. But Google (GOOG) is keeping that gem in-house. An open-source version of MapReduce known as Hadoop is shaping up to become the industry standard.

This means that the two leading software platforms for cloud computing could end up being two flavors of Google, one proprietary and the other-Hadoop-open source. And their battle for dominance could occur even within Google's own clouds. Here's why: MapReduce is so effective because it works exclusively inside Google, and it handles a limited menu of chores. Its versatility is a question. If Hadoop attracts a large community of developers, it could develop into a more versatile tool, handling a wide variety of work, from scientific data-crunching to consumer marketing analytics. And as it becomes a standard in university labs, young computer scientists will emerge into the job market with Hadoop skills.

Gaining Fans
The growth of Hadoop creates a tangle of relationships in the world of megacomputing. The core development team works inside Google's rival, Yahoo! (YHOO). This means that as Google and IBM ( IBM) put together software for their university cloud initiative, announced in October, they will work with a Google clone developed largely by a team at Yahoo. The tool is already gaining fans. Facebook uses Hadoop to analyze user behavior and the effectiveness of ads on the site, says Hadoop founder Doug Cutting, who now works at Yahoo.

In early November, for example, the tech team at The New York Times (NYT) rented computing power on Amazon's ( AMZN) cloud and used Hadoop to convert 11 million archived articles, dating back to 1851, to digital and searchable documents. They turned around in a single day a job that otherwise would have taken months.

[...]
========================

December 13, 2007, 5:00PM EST text size: T T

A Sea Change
Data from the deep like never before
Scientists knee-deep in data are longing for the storage capacity and power of cloud computing. University of Washington oceanographer John R. Delaney is one of many who are desperate to tap into it.

Delaney is putting together a $170 million project called Neptune, which could become the prototype for a new era of data-intensive research. Launching this year, Neptune deploys hundreds of miles of fiber-optic cable connected to thousands of sensors in the Pacific Ocean off the Washington coast. The sensors will stream back data on the behavior of the ocean: its temperature, light, life forms, the changing currents, chemistry, and the physics of motion. Microphones will record the sound track of the deep sea, from the songs of whales to the rumble of underwater volcanos.

Neptune will provide researchers with an orgy of information from the deep. It will extend humanity's eyes and ears-and many other senses-to the two-thirds of the planet we barely know. "We've lived on Planet Land for a long time," says Delaney, who works out of an office near Puget Sound. "This is a mission to Planet Ocean."

He describes the hidden planet as a vast matrix of relationships. Sharks, plankton, red tides, thermal vents spewing boiling water-they're all connected to each other, he says. And if scientists can untangle these ties, they can start to predict how certain changes within the ocean will affect the weather, crops, and life on earth. Later this century, he ventures, we'll have a mathematical model of the world's oceans, and will be able to "manage" them. "We manage Central Park now, and the National Forests," he says. "Why not the oceans?"

To turn Neptune's torrents of data into predictive intelligence, teams of scientists from many fields will have to hunt for patterns and statistical correlations. The laboratory for this work, says Delaney, will be "gigantic disk farms that distribute it all over the planet, just like Google (GOOG)." In other words, Neptune, like other big science projects, needs a cloud. Delaney doesn't yet know on which cloud Neptune will land. Without leaving Seattle, he has Microsoft (MSFT) and Amazon ( AMZN), along with a Google-IBM
(IBM) venture at his own university.

What will the work on this cloud consist of? Picture scientists calling up comparisons from the data and then posing endless queries. In that sense, cloud science may feel a bit like a Google search.



========================

December 13, 2007, 5:00PM EST text size: T T

Online Extra: Google's Head in the Clouds
CEO Eric Schmidt talks about the powerful globe-spanning networks of computers known as clouds, and discovering the next big idea

Instead, think about Google as a star-studded collection of computer scientists who have access to a fabulous machine, a distributed network of data centers that behave as one. These globe-spanning networks of computers are known as "clouds." They represent a new species of global supercomputer, one that specializes in burrowing through mountains of random, unstructured data at lightning speed. Scientists are hungry for this kind of computing. Data-deluged businesses need it.

On cloud computing:

What [cloud computing] has come to mean now is a synonym for the return of the mainframe. It used to be that mainframes had all of the data. You had these relatively dumb terminals. In the PC period, the PC took over a lot of that functionality, which is great. We now have the return of the mainframe, and the mainframe is a set of computers. You never visit them, you never see them. But they're out there. They're in a cloud somewhere. They're in the sky, and they're always around. That's roughly the metaphor.

On Google's place in cloud computing:

Google is a cloud computing server, and in fact we are spending billions of dollars-this is public information-to build data centers, which are in one sense a return to the mainframe. In another sense, they're one large supercomputer. And in another sense, they are the cloud itself.

So Google aspires to be a large portion of the cloud, or a cloud that you would interact with every day. Why would Google want to do that? Well, because we're particularly good at high-speed data and data computation.

On Google's software edge:

Google is so fast because more than one computer is working on your query. It farms out your question, if you will, to on the order of 25 computers. It says, "You guys look over here for some answers, you guys look over here for some answers." And then the answers come back very quickly. It then organizes it to a single answer. You can't tell which computer gave you the answer.

On the size of cloud computing:

There's no limit. The reason Google is investing so much in very-high-speed data is because we see this explosion, essentially digital data multimedia explosion, as infinitely larger than people are talking about today. Everything can be measured, sensed, tracked in real time.

On applications that run on a cloud:

Let's look at Google Earth. You can think of the cloud and the servers that provide Google Earth as a platform for applications. The term we use is location-based services. Here's a simple example. Everyone here has cell phones with GPS and a camera. Imagine if all of a sudden there were a mobile phone which took picture after picture after picture, and posted it to Google Earth about what's going on in the world. Now is that interesting, or will it produce enormous amounts of noise? My guess is that it'll be a lot of noise.

So then we'll have to design algorithms that will sort through to find the things that are interesting or special, which is yet another need for cloud computing. One of the problems is you have these large collections coming in, and they have relatively high noise to value. In our world, it's a search problem.

On Google becoming a giant of computing:

This is our goal. We're doing it because the applications actually need these services. A typical example is that you're a Gmail user. Most people's attachments are megabytes long, because they're attaching everything plus the kitchen sink, and they're using Gmail for transporting random bags of bits. That's the problem of scale. But from a Google perspective, it provides significant barriers to entry against our competitors, except for the very well-funded ones.

I like to think of [the data centers] as cyclotrons. There are only a few cyclotrons in physics and every one of them is important, because if you're a top flight physicist you need to be at the lab where that cyclotron is being run because that's where history's going to be made, that's where the inventions are going to come from. So my idea is that if you think of these as supercomputers that happen to be assembled from smaller computers, we have the most attractive supercomputers, from a science perspective, for people to come work on.

On the Google-IBM education project:

Universities were having trouble participating in this phenomenon [cloud computing] because they couldn't afford the billions of dollars it takes to build these enormous facilities. So [Christophe Bisciglia] figured out a way to get a smaller version of what we're doing into the curriculum, which is clearly positive from our perspective, because it gets the concepts out. But it also whets the appetite for people to say, "Hey, I want 10,000 computers," as opposed to 100.

High Speed Internet Help Cools the Planet

[Lightreading has been carrying a very useful blog on the Future of the Internet. Your faithful correspondent has been making some contributions in regards on how the Internet and ICT in general can contribute in reducing CO2 emissions. This can be done in 3 ways:

(a) The Internet and ICT industry has the tools today to reduce to its own global carbon emissions to absolute zero by collocating routers and servers with renewable energy sites and using advanced data replication and re-routing techniques across optical networks. If the ICT industry alone produces 10% of the global carbon emissions this alone can have significant impact

(b) Developing societal applications that promote use of the Internet as an alternate to carbon generating activities such as tele-commuting, distance learning, etc as outlined below

(c) Deploying "bits and bandwidth for carbon" trading programs as an alternate strategy to carbon taxes, cap and trade and/or carbon offsets as for example in the green broadand initiative - http://green-broadband. Blogspot.com

Thanks to Mr Roques in posting on Lightreading for this pointer--BSA]



Lightreading: The future of the Internet and Global Warming

http://www.internetevolution.com/messages.asp?piddl_msgthreadid=178018&piddl_msgid=151707#msg_151707



Study: High-speed Internet helps cool the planet http://www.news.com/8301-11128_3-9832021-54.html


Tempted to obsess over how another personal habit helps or hurts the Earth? Keep surfing with cable or DSL and you might save carbons in the process, according to the American Consumer Institute.

The world would be spared 1 billion tons of greenhouse gases within a decade if broadband Internet access were pervasive, the group's report (PDF) concluded in October.

Broadband is available to 95 percent of U.S. households but active in only half of them, the study said, noting that near-universal adoption of high-speed Internet would cut the equivalent of 11 percent of oil imports to the United States each year.

How would faster downloads and Web page loads curb the annual flow of globe-warming gases, and by how much? According to the report:

Telecommuting, a "zero emission" practice, eliminates office space and car commutes: 588 million tons.
E-commerce cuts the need for warehouses and long-distance shipping: 206 million tons.
Widespread teleconferencing could bring one-tenth of all flights to a halt: 200 million tons.
Downloading music, movies, newspapers, and books saves packaging, paper, and shipping: 67 million tons.

The Department of Energy estimates that the nation's emissions of carbon dioxide alone total 8 billion tons each year.

A study released and funded by a major Australian telecom company in October also suggested that broader use of broadband could cut that country's carbons by 5 percent by 2015.

All it would take is for more people to use software to monitor shipping schedules, cut the flow of power to dormant gadgets and so forth, the study said.

[...]

The Inefficient Truth - ICT carbon emission to surpass Aviation Industry

http://www.globalactionplan.org.uk/event_detail.aspx?eid=ef0cecc6-2621-4a3c-
962c-e4758b8952f8


The 'Inefficient Truth'

Inefficient ICT Sector's Carbon Emissions set to Surpass Aviation Industry

An Inefficient Truth is the first research report produced by Global Action Plan on behalf of the Environmental IT Leadership Team. The Leadership Team is a unique gathering of major ICT users from a range of different sectors who are committed to taking practical action to cut carbon dioxide emissions.

The report contains four sections.

1. The first section assesses the environmental impact of the ICT sector which is virtually the equivalent of the aviation industry.
2. Section two analyses survey results from major ICT users and discovers how quickly and effectively the sector is responding to the environmental agenda.
3. The third section takes a snapshot look at some case studies illustrating how companies are implementing practical solutions that are reducing carbon emissions and saving them money.
4. Finally, there is a Call to Action from Global Action Plan setting out some of the challenges facing Government, vendors and users in order to move the sector towards a lower carbon future.

An Inefficient Truth is the first part of a longer journey which will see Global Action Plan using its position as an independent practical environmental charity to help cut carbon emissions from the ICT sector.

The environmental charity Global Action Plan today calls on the UK government to introduce legislation and tax incentives to support the adoption of sustainable ICT policies and strategy in British businesses.

The report includes a national survey that is the first to measure awareness between the use of ICT in business and its contribution to the UK's carbon footprint; identify the proportion of companies seeking energy efficient strategies; and to promote examples of best practice.

Key findings in the report include:

* 61% of UK data centres only have the capacity for two years of growth.
* 37% of companies are storing data indefinitely due to government policy.
* Nearly 40% of servers are underutilised by more than 50%.
* 80% of respondents do not believe their company's data policies are environmentally sustainable.

Trewin Restorick, director of Global Action Plan and chair of the EILT, comments, "ICT equipment currently accounts for 3-4% of the world's carbon emissions, and 10% of the UK's energy bill. The average server, for example, has roughly the same annual carbon footprint as an SUV doing 15 miles-per-gallon! With a carbon footprint now equal to the aviation industry, ICT, and how businesses utilise ICT, will increasingly come under the spotlight as governments seek to achieve carbon-cutting commitments."

The survey, which was completed by CIOs, IT directors and senior decision makers from 120 UK enterprises, found that over 60% of respondents consider time pressures and cost the biggest barriers to adopting sustainable ICT policies, and believe that recognised standards and tax allowances would provide the most valuable support towards reducing ICT's contribution to the UK's carbon emissions.

Restorick adds, "The survey illustrates that ICT departments have been slow off the mark to address their carbon footprint. Awareness is now growing but to turn this into action, ICT departments need help. They need vendors to give them better information rather than selling green froth, they need Government policies to become more supportive and less contradictory, and they need more support from within their organisations."

Logicalis, international ICT provider and sponsors of 'An Inefficient Truth', agrees that legislation and tax incentives are important, but, first and foremost, businesses must evaluate the efficiency of existing ICT infrastructure, citing server under-utilisation and the data centre as prime examples of energy abuse. Tom Kelly, managing director for Logicalis UK,
comments:

"The government's draft climate change bill proposes a 60% cut in emissions by 2050. In this environment, a flabby business that guzzles budget and energy is likely to be a prime target for impending legislation.

"CIOs have a responsibility to ensure their ICT infrastructure can support a lean and dynamic business, yet as this survey demonstrates, many ICT departments are unsure if and how they can maximise their existing assets. With data centre capacity at a premium, and energy bills escalating, CIOs are well advised to look inward for energy saving initiatives and to instigate cultural change throughout the business. In short, efficient IT equals green IT."

As a result of the survey Global Action Plan is calling on ICT vendors and the government to provide businesses with the support and tools to implement ICT best practice. These demands include:

* Government to provide incentives to help companies reduce the carbon footprint of their IT activities
* Government to ensure that there is a sufficient supply of energy for data centre needs in the future
* Government to review its policies on long-term data storage to take into account the carbon implications
* ICT vendors to significantly improve the quality of their environmental information
* ICT departments to be accountable for the energy costs of running and cooling ICT equipment
* Companies to ensure ICT departments are fully engaged in their CSR and environmental policies
* Companies to ensure that their ICT infrastructure meets stricter efficiency targets

Gary Hird, Technical Strategy Manager for John Lewis Partnership and member of the EILT comments: "Green Computing is an opportunity for us all to clearly demonstrate IT's value in helping our companies tackle an urgent, and global, issue. It is vital that we do a good job collectively and that means being open about the specific problems we're facing and the solutions we're pursuing. The Global Action Plan survey provides a 'current state' understanding of companies' green IT initiatives and the obstacles we must overcome to help them succeed."

Carbon dixoide emissions from ICT industry equal that of aviation industry

[Here is a fascinating news clip from Sky news that puts the carbon emissions of ICT industry in perspective. They claim that carbon emissions from global ICT community equal that of the worldwide aviation industry and are growing much faster. One small computer server generates as much carbon dioxide as a SUV with a fuel efficiency of 15 miles per gallon. The ICT industry in the UK consumes the equivalent amount of electricity as produced by 4 nuclear reactors. The aviation industry is already going to great lengths to mitigate its carbon footprint, but to date very little comparable developments are being undertaken by the ICT industry. And yet the ICT industry in my opinion is in the best position of any sector in society to reduce its carbon footprint to nearly zero and beyond.

Thanks to Conal Henry for this posting on Gordon Cooks Arch-econ list --BSA]

http://news.sky.com/skynews/video/videoplayer/0,,31200-1295311,.html

New Internet architectures to reduce carbon emissions

[This is another posting as part of my own evolving thought processes how the Internet, and in particular research and education networks can help reduce carbon dioxide emissions, firstly by re-engineering the network and secondly by deploying applications and services that will encourage others to use the Internet in novel ways in order to minimize their own carbon footprint.

First of all I would like to thank all those people who sent me e-mails with additional suggestions, comments and ideas on how ICT technologies, in particular the Internet and broadband can be used to mitigate the impact of global warming. Given the large number of e-mails I have received on the subject I apologize if I have not been able to reply to some of you directly.

I want to assure you that none of my ideas, and those of others that have been posted here, are in any way cast in stone or anywhere close to deployment. Many of these ideas are come from my own fevered brain, and may likely never survive close scrutiny by experts or validation in the marketplace. The purpose of this e-mail and my blog is to hopefully stimulate some creative thinking in the Internet community and especially within R&E networks on ways we can collectively design "green" Internet solutions. This is a community that is used to rapid changes and has many of the most innovative people in business or academia. Hopefully my blog, in some small way, will stimulate others in developing more robust and scalable solutions that help address, what in my opinion, is the biggest challenge of this generation and of this decade - global warming.


In today's modern Internet networks one of the biggest energy sinks, and consequently a significant producer of carbon emission due to their electrical and cooling requirement, is the Internet core routers.

Internet routers are custom designed pieces of computing equipment which must operate at very high speeds in order to do fast lookups in the forwarding table in order to process packets at line speeds. The need to do fast lookups is further compounded by the continued growth of routing tables over the past few years.

In order to handle the processing of packets at wire line speeds modern routers usually have multiple ASICs on the forwarding card. Each ASIC handles only a subset of the forwarding address table, which is split up between the various ASICs on /8, /16 (or finer grained) address boundaries.

But an alternate routing architecture approach to big core routers with multiple ASICs is to deploy networks of multiple virtual routers, with each network of virtual routers assigned an address block. All virtual routers for a given address block linked together by a dedicated lightpath network independent of parallel virtual routers and networks for other address blocks.

Each address range or block would have a global set of virtual routers dedicated to forwarding and routing with that address block. And optical connections between the virtual routers can be traffic engineered to optimize flows for that address block. As well separate OSPF (or ISIS) networks can be deployed for each address block. At inter-domain boundaries these separate address block networks can be aggregated into a single connection to a neighbouring AS, or arrangements can be made to advertise separate BGP networks with parallel ASs for each address block network.

At first blush this seems to be an incredible waste of resources. Not only would separate routing tables and networks would have to be maintained, but multiple copies of filtering policies etc would have to be deployed for each network address block.

However by breaking up the forwarding table into multiple (roughly) parallel forwarding networks, where each network is assigned a specific address block allows us to deploy much more inexpensive commoditized routers using off the shelf open source routing engines like Vyatta.

Because these routers don’t have to do lookups on the entire forwarding table they can be built with more inexpensive commodity components. In effect we are trading off large forwarding tables using ASICs against commodity virtual routers with multiple parallel optical networks for each address block.

More importantly these low cost (and low energy, hence low carbon emission) devices can now be collocated nearby renewable energy sites. Not all such sites need to have to support all virtual routers to carry the entire routing table. Instead address block networks can be engineered with different topologies linking together independent renewable energy sites supporting alternate nodes for the various address block networks.

Because we have also broken down the Internet into many (roughly) parallel networks aligned along each address block, outages and re-routing can be more easily handled, especially as the routing nodes are located at renewable energy sites such as windmills and solar power farms.

Users would be backhauled to with dedicated optical links to two or more virtual router renewable energy sites. The assumption is that an all optical backhaul network has much lower carbon emissions than an energy consuming electronic local router or stat-mux switch.

This architecture would be ideal for R&E networks as generally they have a very small number of directly connected organizations such as universities and research centers. These organizations can even pre-classify their outgoing packets along the address block boundaries and send them out separate parallel optical channels to the nearest renewable energy site(s) supporting the multiple virtual routers for each address block.

Companies like Google are also well positioned to take advantage of this architecture as they have a world wide distributed network of low cost servers and they are rumored to be deploying costumed developed 10Gbe switches on their own private optical network. The same principles that Google used for their network of search engines could be applied to a virtual routed network as described here.

Optical networks are much better suited for this application as opposed to MPLS and PBT networks which require electronic devices to do the forwarding and label switching. Optical networks can be significantly more energy efficient than electronic networks, but unquestionably far less efficient in terms of multiplexing packets. Tools like Inocybe's Argia can be used to do the traffic engineering of the various optical paths assigned to each address block.

For more information on this architectural concepts please see my blog or presentations at http://green-broadband.blogspot.com

Replacing electrical transmission lines with optical networks

One of the challenges of delivering renewable energy such as wind power or solar systems is the high cost of the electrical transmission lines to carry the power to where it is needed. Unfortunately ideal solar and wind power sites are rarely located near major urban centers. Most renewable energy systems produce relatively small amounts of power compared to a coal and nuclear power plants, and as consequence the cost of the electrical transmission line given the distances to reach renewable energy sites can completely undermine the business case for deploying a renewable energy system in the first place.

But maybe there is another solution of rather than building expensive electrical transmission lines to link these remote renewable energy sites to the electrical grid we instead move our cyber-infrastructure servers, storage and other facilities to the renewable energy sites themselves and link them with optical networks to the global information grid - the Internet.

One of the fastest growing energy consuming sectors is information communication technologies (ICT). It is estimated that ICT consumer upwards of 9% of all the energy output in North America through direct electrical consumption and cooling. Cyber-infrastructure facilities, corporate server farms, etc are major sinks for electrical power and cooling and are putting enormous strains on the electrical systems of our cities, universities and businesses.

With today's modern telecommunication facilities, there is no reason why these cyber-infrastructure facilities and server farms need to be located in close proximity with their users. High speed optical networks allow these facilities to be located anywhere. In fact many large corporations like Google, Microsoft, Amazon and others are already starting to collocate their server farms to low cost energy sites around the world.

The obvious next step in this evolution is to collocate cyber-infrastructure equipment and servers directly to the renewable energy sites themselves. And rather than building expensive electrical transmission systems to connect these renewable energy sites to the electrical grid, we instead build much cheaper optical networks to the servers to interconnect them to the global information grid - the Internet.

One downside of this approach, is that these cyber-infrastructure facilities and servers will not be connected to any electrical grid, and as result they will experience a lot more outages and down time dues to the waxing and waning of the wind or the diurnal cycle of the sun. But the beauty of ICT is that we already have the technology to do rapid load balancing of servers due to outages, and of course, the Internet from day one has been designed to route around outages.

We have the technology at hand to build "follow the wind" or "follow the sun" computing grids using optical networks to ensure extreme high reliability information systems and computing grids regardless of whether or not components of the underlying physical computational network and/or storage facilities are available and on line. The mesh of global optical networks around the world will further help provide load balancing due to varying wind and solar conditions.

Ben Bacque of Alcatel-Lucent has even suggested that we locate these renewable energy/server farms in Canada's remote artic regions because this would also help address the cooling challenges of todays modern servers. Up to now it has been impractical to locate renewable systems in Canada's high north because of the high cost of building transmission lines over immense distances across inhospitable terrain.

Building optical networks to remote renewable energy systems will also allow governments to achieve an important social objective of delivering high speed Internet to remote and rural communities and would provide much needed jobs for the maintenance and care of these server farms and renewable energy systems.

Optical networks can be also used to interconnect micro-power systems that provide power to peer to peer storage and computing grids. As with renewable energy systems, the existing electrical grid is ill suited for connecting hundreds, if not thousands of small micro electrical power systems located at our homes and businesses. The interconnection to the grid requires costly and expensive switches and meters that must be installed by professional electricians, and the distribution system must be re-configured to handle power origination from those who were traditionally consumers of electricity.

So rather than connecting the micro-power systems to the electrical grid we can perhaps use them to power locally hosted servers and storage facilities. And as before these servers and storage facilities can be interconnected via a well proven peer to peer grid over the Internet.

Robin Chase sent me an interesting pointer to a talk given by John Holdren (Director of Woods Hole Research Center) to the UN in September 2007, John Holdren's slides had a stunning number: If worldwide CO2 emissions peak in 2015 – that’s seven years from now – we have a 50 percent chance of avoiding catastrophic effects of climate change.

http://networkmusings.blogspot.com/2007/10/closing-climate-change-window-of.html

Most scientists already think we are at a tipping point in terms of CO2 emissions.

To my mind the ICT industry and research community as a whole has a moral responsibility to help address this problem. If the ICT industry and research community consumes 9% of the global energy budget, we can safely assume that ICT contributes to 9% of the worlds global emissions of carbon dioxide. But as opposed to any other sector in society ICT community has the means and tools to virtually eliminate this entire carbon footprint (and possibly more) through the many techniques I have outlined in this blog and previous postings. A 9% drop in carbon emissions over the next decade would dramatically mitigate the threat of global warming.

We need a call to action by the ICT industry and research community. We need to start immediately testing and experimenting with these ideas and many more that I am sure will be thought of in the process of identifying possible solutions. We need to immediately freeze the carbon budgets of our universities, research centers and server farms. Universities and research centers are the institutions that should be demonstrating global leadership and developing new solutions to address global warming.

New revenue opportunities for R&E networks and cyber-infrastructure

One of the growing challenges for many campuses around the world is how to accommodate the power and cooling requirements of cyber-infrastructure facilities such as high performance computers, storage facilities, etc.

Increasingly the costs of the bricks and mortar, power and cooling to house these facilities significantly outweigh costs of the actual cyber-infrastructure equipment.

In Canada, for example, many universities who are part of the HPC Consortium called Compute Canada will have to make significant investments in the coming year, to install and upgrade power and air conditioning systems to host a range of new computation facilities funded by CFI at various institutions.

The carbon emission impact has yet to be even taken into consideration in many any of these plans. The carbon footprint of a modern HPC facility can easily exceed the average use of several SUVs.

Global warming in not only a problem to be solved by politicians. It is a global issue in which we all have a personal responsibility to address regardless if we are an average joe citizen or world leading computer scientist.

Researchers and funding bodies need to take into consideration the carbon dioxide emission impact of all these cyber-infrastructure facilities. Building the fastest and best supercomputer regardless of its environmental impact is simply not an option any more. Universities and computing science researchers should be playing a leading role in identifying new cyber-infrastructure solutions which not only address their research requirements but also take into account the carbon emission impact of these facilities. Perhaps deploying energy efficient grids, sharing under-used computational facilities, or utilizing virtual computing is a better answer than building a physical cyber-infrastructure facility at every campus.

We also need to address the ongoing proliferation of computer clusters throughout various computer departments. Unfortunately most of these departments do not pay for the power and cooling costs associated with these facilities and so do not appreciate their true impact on the overall energy use of the university or the associated carbon emissions. As I mentioned on this blog before using Amazon's EC2/S3 service in many cases can be cheaper than the power costs alone of a modern computational cluster, never mind the operational and overhead costs of operating such a facility.

This is where regional and national research networks can play an important role. There are now many carbon offset companies who will audit programs that are designed to reduce carbon emissions. They will also broker payment of real dollars for the carbon reductions that result from the program. If an organization setups a tele-commuting program and demonstrate real and auditable reduction in carbon emissions they can earn revenue through the sale of carbon offsets to energy companies and other organizations. A good example is where IBM is working with a carbon offset company which is offering up to $1 million in carbon offsets for organizations to move away from their physical servers to high energy efficiency virtual servers operated by IBM.

R&E networks are ideally positioned to negotiate and implement these carbon offsetting solutions. Network organizations are essential for implementing any carbon offset strategy. As well the carbon impact of an optical R&E network is miniscule compared to the carbon footprint of many high performance computers and other facilities. The more we can use network bits and bandwidth for advanced science instead of physical facilities the greater the potential for earning valuable offset dollars (and I would argue the better the science community will be served).

Another potential carbon offset revenue opportunity is with distance learning and tele-medicine. Although the jury is still out on the pedagogical value of distance learning, encouraging students to undertake some of their course program work at home can be just as effective as tele-commuting in terms of earning carbon offset dollars. The same goes for tele-medicine. If companies can earn carbon offset dollars to implement tele-commuting programs, universities and R&E networks should be able to earn carbon offsets for offering distance learning and tele-medicine programs. (But as I argued in previous posts, rather than exchanging dollars in terms of carbon offsets, I would recommend exchanging other "zero carbon" awards such as offering participating students free eTextbooks, free music video, etc)

Finally R&E optical networks have an important role in redefining the entire value chain of the network itself. Many R&E networks are largely underutilized in terms of traditional measures of traffic volumes etc. Given these traffic volumes (and slowing growth) it would have been far cheaper in some cases for universities or funding agencies to purchase managed bandwidth from the carriers rather than build their own R&E networks.

But nobody yet has measured the carbon impact of these various optical, wavelength and customer owned networks. I would argue that in fact the carbon footprint of dark fiber, wavelengths and customer controlled network with optical switches is significantly less than a traditional carrier with expensive high end switches and (especially) routers which collectively consume the power of a small nuclear reactor. British Telecom for example has announced an initiative to use renewable energy sources as it is one of the biggest consumers of energy in the UK.

Instead of measuring the value of a network in terms of "bits per second", we instead should be using "bits per carbon". And while the utilization of R&E network may be low by traditional measurement standards of "bps" its impact on the environment may be significantly less when measured by "bpc" compared to a commercial network. And once again, the R&E networks can help develop a new business model through carbon offset trading by demonstrating that an optical lightpath mesh network has significantly less of a carbon footprint than a traditional electronic routed network.

An even more interesting and radical concept is to replace expensive electricity lines with optical networks. Instead of "wheeling" expensive power to physical servers at universities we can instead "wheel" inexpensive bits between virtual servers, grids located at renewable energy sites around the world.

For example the global community of optical research networks (GLIF) could build a "follow the sun" grid infrastructure. Solar powered high performance computing facilities could be located at remote desert locations throughout the world. But these systems would not be connected to any electrical grid, and instead be linked by a global high speed optical network. As the sun starts to set on any given HPC site, the currently running jobs and OS images would immediately transferred over the optical network to the next HPC site that is just starting to come active with the rising sun.

Bottom line is that I believe research and education networks can play important leadership role in defining these new business and network models related to trading "bits and bandwidth for carbon". They could also be working with universities to freeze, if not decrease, the carbon output of these institutions. To my mind universities should at the forefront in our society in finding solutions and new business models to address global warming. At least they should not be the worst offenders in terms of all these high carbon emission cyber-infrastructure facilities that are now being deployed at our campuses.