Call for more efficient computing gathers voices
Last month it was Sun Microsystems calling for a more energy-efficient computing world, but Google is also taking aim at the performance-per-watt issue. “The possibility of computer equipment power consumption spiraling out of control could have serious consequences for the overall affordability of computing, not to mention the overall health of the plant,” wrote Google engineer Luiz Andre Barroso in a computer engineering trade paper published in September.
He argues that growing power consumption of computer servers means the electricity bill for running one of these machines for a few years could soon be higher than the actual cost of the hardware itself.
Again, maybe Sun Microsystems’ Scott McNealy is onto something.
Tyler Hamilton is senior energy reporter and columnist for the Toronto Star, Canada's largest daily newspaper. In addition to this Clean Break blog, Tyler writes a weekly column of the same name that discusses trends, happenings and innovators in the cleantech market. This blog is a personal project started in April 2005. It is not an official blog of the newspaper. Tyler can be reached at tyler@cleanbreak.ca
December 26th, 2005 at 9:26 am
was sure i left this comment before….
anyone who has a fe whundred to a few thousand computers in tehir ocmpany might want to look at this tech– British Air, Microsoft, Scotia Bank (and a few others in Canada) already use it. it’s called Night Watchman from a company calle 1E (www.1e.com) and it saves upwards of $350 (CDN per workstation (and = 1/2 CO2 per PC) and it does this by allowing IT departments to power up and shut down computers– -elimination the need to keep them running 24/7
…just a good tip for anyone who wants to have more efficient IT and save money
lee