Stories
Slash Boxes
Comments

SoylentNews is people

Cutting Cloud Computing's Carbon Cost

posted by martyb on Saturday September 13 2014, @05:49PM   Printer-friendly
from the using-only-what-you-need? dept.

janrinok writes:

Cloud computing involves displacing data storage and processing from the user's computer on to remote servers. It can provide users with more storage space and computing power that they can then access from anywhere in the world rather than having to connect to a single desktop or other computer with its finite resources. However, some observers have raised concerns about the increased energy demands of sustaining distributed servers and having them up and running continuously, where an individual user's laptop might be shut down when it is not in use or the resources utilization of the server is less than the lower threshold, for instance.

Now, writing in the International Journal of Information Technology, Communications and Convergence, researchers at the University of Oran in Algeria, have investigated how cloud computing systems might be optimized for energy use and to reduce their carbon footprint. Jouhra Dad and Ghalem Belalem in the Department of Computer Science at Oran explain how they have developed an algorithm to control the virtual machines running on computers in a cloud environment so that energy use of the core central processing units (CPUs) and memory capacity (RAM as opposed to hard disk storage space) can be reduced as far as possible without affecting performance overall.

Unfortunately, there is little detailed information on the algorithm itself in the article.

I suspect some Soylents have home servers which they access from within their home as well as remotely. What, if anything, do you do to reduce your energy costs?

 
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.
Cutting Cloud Computing's Carbon Cost | Log In/Create an Account | Top | 36 comments | Search Discussion
Display Options Threshold/Breakthrough Mark All as Read Mark All as Unread
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 13 2014, @06:11PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 13 2014, @06:11PM (#92779)

    Want to save some carbon? [hpcwire.com]

    The Optalysys Optical Solver Supercomputer will initially offer 9 petaflops of compute power, increasing to 17.1 exaflops by 2020.

    Perhaps the most impressive trait of all is the reduced energy footprint. Power remains one of the foremost barriers to reaching exascale with a traditional silicon processor approach, but these optical computers are said to need only a standard mains supply. Estimated running cost: just £2,100 per year (US$3,500).

    If it works, that's 1,000 to 1 million GFLOPS/W, vs. 4.4 GFLOPS/W [green500.org].

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 13 2014, @07:39PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 13 2014, @07:39PM (#92791)

    By contrast, 50 GFLOPS/Watt would enable a 20 MW, 1 exaflops supercomputer, which is the [hpcwire.com] target [hpcwire.com].

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 13 2014, @10:43PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 13 2014, @10:43PM (#92826)

    mod parent up! the linked article deserves its own story (probably has already but i never heard of it before)

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 14 2014, @12:19AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 14 2014, @12:19AM (#92842)

      They say they will demo the 340 GFLOPS version in January, so that'd be a good time to follow-up.