Now Serving: (energy-efficient) Chips
by Kristin Underwood, San Diego, CA on 02.18.07
According to a recent study by Jonathan Koomey of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratories, the energy consumed by US servers accounts for .6% of overall US electricity consumption. If you add in the energy used to cool these systems that number doubles to 1.2%, the same amount of energy consumed by all US televisions. If current trends continue, "server electricity usage" could increase 40% by 2010 as computing needs expand exponentially. The whole thing sounds like operator error to us.
In the last five years US servers burned through 5 million kw of power – that’s the equivalent of five 1GW power plants, or more than “the total possible output from the Chernobyl plant” when it was working. But as they say, one mans trash is another mans treasure and computer companies everywhere can see business opportunities in inefficiencies. AMD, the company sponsoring the study, is offering energy-efficient chips and efficient processors. Intel is also now offering efficient chips. The US Environmental Protection Agency is trumpeting the study and hopes that other companies will see an opportunity to reduce energy consumption. Is this another case of hoping our technology will save us from…our technology?
Check out this TH article for more ideas on how to reduce the footprint of your own personal computer.
Yessss - That is the right way to lower the server farms power consumption problems. Pay the chip companies who helped cause the problem more money to "solve" the problem
More "kool-aid" please!
If current trends continue, the energy consumed will jump to 40% by 2010.
I think you meant "jump 40% by 2010". I don't think it is possible for enough processors to be made to use 40% of our energy needs in 3 years.
Additionally, how is it the chip makers faults? The users (TreeHugger.com included) all demand faster more processors. We should be happy there is a huge movement towards more efficient chips right now.
Finally, you have to look at the value we get from these. I get way more value from internet servers than I do from TV. And these servers are a shared resource (many users at once), so the actual cost per user is very low.
Is it possible that an increase of 40% was meant? I also expect that the time between 2000 and and 2010 will be a knid of heyday for servers, with new server demand slowing. But I could be wrong, too.
Wow, this is a really surprising figure - I didn't think it would be so high. We're in the earth friendly web hosting business:
http://www.thinkhost.com
.. We made the switch to powering our servers and general operations via renewable energy quite a while back which has been one of the best moves we ever made; very popular with our clients.
I guess we'll start looking at the CPU's in our servers next; after all, going "green" isn't just about energy supply choices, but consumption levels. Thanks for flagging this study!
Thanks for catching that. I've updated the article.
The true innovation in server energy efficiency is coming out of Sun Microsystems. (Why were they not mentioned in your post?!) Their Cool Threads servers are the only servers eligible for an efficiency incentive rebate from Pacific Gas & Electric.
See Business Week's piece on some data center power consumption for some analysis of other innovations occuring in this space.
The pace of innovation toward server efficiency will accellerate now that Congress has enacted HR 5646 which specifically promotes the use of energy efficient servers.
That's a lot of energy. I use a acornhost.com to host my green design website, www.risingphoenixdeisn.com. Acornhost purchases green-e certificates to offset carbon from servers and it is not much extra $. Not quite as cool as aiso.net (who actually have their own solar array) but way more affordable.
Thanks for updating the article. It is good to know are concerned about accuracy.
@TrollPatrol:
The final analysis has to include the energy consumption avoidance that is made possible by all these server based services. Internet telephony and video conferencing require compute power, but all alleviate some of the demand for travel. Many types of shopping are now more efficiently performed by surfing online than by driving from store to store.
Hard to say whether the net impact to GHG emmissions is positive or negative, but relative to economic growth, it's hard to imagine that energy demand would be less if not for the Internet that is enabled by all these servers.
The study would be concerning from an environmental impact were it not for the movement toward virtualized servers. Previously we had to have a separate box for each item, and now we can combine a dozen boxes into a single one. Yes, it is a more powerful box, but it uses considerably less electricity than the boxes it replaces, and we can keep adding 'servers' to the box until performance degrades.
Hopefully the virtualization movement can keep the 2010 prediction from happening.
Not only are we (AISO.Net)(http://www.aiso.net) as mentioned above using solar power via solar panels, we are also using virtualization on our servers as mentioned above. We have virtualized all of our servers resulting in a more then 20 virtual server to one (1) physical server ratio. Plus, because of the virtualization we now have redundant clustered servers and a SAN to create even better uptime and service levels. We have gone beyond all the other hosting companies by doing more then just making sure our electricity is environmentally friendly via solar panels. Our data center and office is green too by using environmentally friendly, low energy water based air conditioners, solar tubes to bring in natural light during the day, a propane powered generator instead of diesel (which most other hosting companies have), VMWare virtualization to reduce our server electricity usage as I stated before, 6 watt energy saving desktop computers for our employees, and soon to be LEED certified as a green data center, the only public one in North America. We have been featured in Inc. Magazines' Top 50 Green Companies along with the Wall Street Journal, Wired Magazine, ComputerWorld and Entrepreneur Magazine just to name a few. AISO is also the first and currently the only public data center that is a member of the U.S. Green Building Council. We also have a partnership with Co-Op America, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, and the U.S. Green Building Council (USBGC). To find out more ways we are helping the environment and how our virtualization works check out our web site.