We read a lot about how datacenters need to be more energy efficient. PCs are becoming more and more energy efficient. That is true and is happening but what’s alarming is that we use ever more of the energy efficient stuff.
Where we had single core systems in the past we now have quad/eight-core systems. They are more efficient in Watt per MIPS but we now use ever more MIPS. So we are not really conserving energy. We would only be doing that if we kept the system usage the same. We have noticed in our test datacenter that the power usage has gone up dramatically and the cooling needs too. I think it is out of proportion to what’s being done. Nonetheless we need to put more power in and more cooling and….
The new power is going into more ram and HW to run newer and bigger OS’s, Java runtimes, .Net APIs,… Do they bring more power to the user? Do software developers need to start thinking about power usage? I definitely think so. We need to start thinking of how and when to use multi cores and business needs to think about how time critical batch processing is. Developers need to know what API call consumes how much power per call and the such. Power saving features of hardware need to be used and optimised.
As for your desktop PC and/or your notebook… Most of us are using it to surf or do email. Maybe a little photo library stuff too. So why do we need quad-core 500-1200W consuming monster machines (I am not addressing the gamers out there)? Those machines would have replaced a whole scientific supercomputer 10 years ago. Luckily the notebooks are getting more prevalent. They usually use up to 80W. Even more interesting are the new Netbooks. They use even less power. Looking at Demand people are getting that too although power usage is not their motivation.
I still think IT is using far too much power for what is really needed. I’ve seen numbers like 15% of the worlds power is consumed by IT, one Google search consumes the equivalent power of running an energy saving lamp for 1 hour. I don’t know if these are just myths but they shure point to some smoke. We need to check in our own back yards (i.e. PCs and datacenters) if there’s a fire too.
Tags: climate, Environment, green, Personal, politics, sustainability