[Great article that portends the future low carbon economy. Excerpts - BSA]
http://www.isgtw.org/?pid=1002668
When the sun sets on the Communications Research Centre in Ottawa, Canada, the solar-powered computational jobs might be sent across the high-speed connection to the Cybera data center in Calgary, where its still bright and sunny. And when the sun stops shining in Calgary, if the wind is blowing at the wind-powered BastionHost facility in Truro, Nova Scotia, then the jobs could be sent back east.
Most forms of renewable energy are not reliable at any given location. But Canadas Green Star Network aims to demonstrate that by allowing the computations to follow the renewable energy across a large, fast network, the footprint of high-throughput computing can be drastically reduced.
What we hope to explore at a high level is whether the concept has merit, said Martin Brooks, an independent research consultant working on the GSN; Brooks recently retired from the National Research Councils Institute for Information Technology.
If it is successful, said Brooks, the GSN will develop new methods for reducing the carbon footprint of computational resources, and develop a standard that will allow people to innovate in this area.
The advantages of GSNs approach go beyond those conferred by the use of renewable energy sources. Normally, once electricity is generated at large power plants, it must travel large distances via the power grid to reach the computers that power computational science. In the process, a great deal of power `is wasted, dissipated via the resistance of the power lines.
By using the energy where it is generated, the Green Star Networks data centers will also use less energy.
There will probably be some applications that its not appropriate to move, so there are some applications that are not appropriate for this sort of agile environment, Brooks said. The kind of applications that we expect to field will include server structures of different kinds, web servers and other ordinary internet services like that, and well also include some computation intensive nodes.
The key part of the project is the controller, that takes in information about computational load at each node and energy availability at each node and reallocates the computations to keep them running as the various nodes go up and down because of wind and solar variability, explained John Spence, a researcher emeritus at the Communications Research Centre Canada.
The controller will manage GSNs middleware, which leverages existing interoperability projects such as the Open Cloud Computing Interface and Network Service Interface. Interoperability is crucial to the GSN because international partnerships are crucial; in a network with nodes covering every time zone, the sun will always be shining somewhere.
Already, the GSN has formed associate partnerships with i2cat in Spain, HEAnet and NDRC in Ireland, IBBT in Belgium, and ESnet and
Calit2 in the United States.
The project is young, but making steady progress.
Once it is up and running, the GeoChronos science gateway will be among the first to try it out.
Related articles:
Reducing the ICT Sectors Carbon Footprint (pdf), by Andrew Mackarel, HEAnet Program Manager
Case study: The GeoChronos web portal, by Miriam Boon, iSGTW
Miriam Boon, iSGTW
This blog is about using ICTs to develop climate change preparedness solutions built around Energy Internet and autonomous eVehicles
Energy Internet and eVehicles Overview
Governments around the world are wrestling with the challenge of how to prepare society for inevitable climate change. To date most people have been focused on how to reduce Green House Gas emissions, but now there is growing recognition that regardless of what we do to mitigate against climate change the planet is going to be significantly warmer in the coming years with all the attendant problems of more frequent droughts, flooding, sever storms, etc. As such we need to invest in solutions that provide a more robust and resilient infrastructure to withstand this environmental onslaught especially for our electrical and telecommunications systems and at the same time reduce our carbon footprint.
Using autonomous eVehicles for Renewable Energy Transportation and Distribution: http://goo.gl/bXO6x and http://goo.gl/UDz37
Free High Speed Internet to the Home or School Integrated with solar roof top: http://goo.gl/wGjVG
High level architecture of Internet Networks to survive Climate Change: https://goo.gl/24SiUP
Architecture and routing protocols for Energy Internet: http://goo.gl/niWy1g
How to use Green Bond Funds to underwrite costs of new network and energy infrastructure: https://goo.gl/74Bptd