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Green Clouds, Black Swans

By Rob Mitchum // October 31, 2012

When the New York Times ran their investigative report in September on the massive amount of energy used by data centers, it drew widespread criticism from people within the information technology industry. While nobody involved with the operation or engineering of those data centers denied that they use a lot of resources, many experts took offense at the article’s suggestion that the industry wasn’t interested in finding solutions. “The assertions made in it essentially paint our engineers and operations people as a bunch of idiots who are putting together rows and rows of boxes on data centers and not caring what this costs to their businesses, nay, to the planet,” wrote computer scientist Diego Doval, “And nothing could be further from the truth.”

That statement was backed up by a talk given last week by Hewlett Packard Labs Fellow Partha Ranganathan, who told a room of computer science students and researchers about his company’s efforts to develop “energy-aware computing.” Ranganathan made the argument for more efficient supercomputers and data centers not just on the merits of environmental benefits, but also as an essential hurdle that must be cleared for computing speed to continue the exponential march charted by Moore’s Law. As the field hopes to push through the petascale to the exascale and beyond, Ranganathan said that the “power wall” – the energy required for power and cooling — was becoming a fundamental limit to capacity. So one of the greatest challenges the IT field currently faces is how to deliver faster and faster performance at both low cost and high sustainability.

Massive amounts of research is already underway at HP and elsewhere to solve this problem through disruptive new technologies, the “black swans” proposed by Nassim Nicholas Taleb. Solutions such as three-dimensional “stacking” of memory or the recently-discovered “missing fourth electrical component,” memristors, have the potential to enable new computing architecture that is both faster and more efficient, Ranganathan said. As new data centers are built to deal with booming demand around the world and increasing use of cloud services, they will have to be designed with sustainability in mind. Ranganathan described the concept of a data-centric data center, a recursive sounding idea that uses advanced technology and hierarchical organization to meet modern demands at a lower energy cost.

Many of the solutions Ranganathan talked about fit the theme of “treating the data center as a computer,” designing data centers to work as a more integrated whole and, presumably, saving on some of the energy inefficiencies, such as idle servers, described in the New York Timesinvestigation. For an industry that already uses billions of terawatt hours and makes up 2 percent of the world’s carbon footprint, numbers that will only grow as more and more countries come online, every effort to paint the clouds green will help.