The Greening of IT (10-Jul-07)

From Lauraibm

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by Charlie Bess

Recently EDS joined one of the many IT organizations oriented around energy efficient computing – Climate Savers. We’ve written a few blog entries on the impact of power like: this and this. In fact if I include the impact of battery technology, it seems to be one of the topics that we seem to go back to more than just about any other.

The Climate Savers group has some pretty aggressive goals -- “By 2010, the Climate Savers Computing Initiative will cut greenhouse gas emissions in an amount equal to removing more than 11 million cars from the road or shutting down 20 500-megawatt coal-fired power plants – a significant step in reducing the emissions affecting our planet,” said Pat Gelsinger, senior vice president and general manager of Intel’s Digital Enterprise Group.

Power utilization appears to be a driver of change within more and more industries. Virtualization is going to have tremendous impact on the efficiency and power consumption of the data centre of the future. New CPU architectures and the use of multi-core technologies (like Sun’s efforts around CoolThreads) is also having its effect on reducing the power hungry dependence we’ve developed on over clocked monolithic processors. The implications on how we write code though have yet to make their way into the universities or IT shops. This is much more than just an infrastructure play.

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Source

• 1. EDS website