nowEurope

I am very glad to have the opportunity to be a nowEurope contributor. With my first article and warm welcome I would like to call your attention to global warming, in particular to the ICT aspects of the combat against climate change.

As part of its effort to combat climate change, the European Commission recently announced that it would promote the use of ICT (Information and Communications Technologies) to improve energy efficiency throughout the economy.
The Commission will focus on three energy intensive sectors: energy generation and distribution, the heating, cooling and lighting of buildings and lighting. In these areas innovative ICT solutions can help lowering emissions.

The press release can be found here: http://europa.eu/rapid/pressReleasesAction.do?reference=IP/08/733

The Commission also pointed out that the ICT sector itself, which at present accounts for 2% of global CO2 emissions, can lead by example the drive towards carbon neutrality.

I’m really glad that attention gained to the energy efficiency of ICT solutions.

For a long time has been research aiming at reducing power consumption of ICT devices, but this research is primarily motivated by increased mobility. Lower power consumption of notebooks, mobile phones, PDAs etc. enables lighter weight and longer standby time.

On the other hand, desktop and servers consume more and more power. If we look inside a new desktop computer, we will notice that huge fans and even special cooling solutions are responsible for dissipating heat from the integrated circuits such as CPUs, chipset and graphics cards, along with hard drives. While this increased heat is a side-effect of increased performance, this heat is also generated from the electricity network, thus increasing global CO2 emission.

Servers are a really important issue:

• While a desktop computer runs about 40 hours a week, a server runs 168 hours a week.
• While a desktop contains mostly one hard disk, a server contains disk arrays of several disks.
• While a desktop powered by a single power supply, a server contains redundant power supplies.

In addition, server computers may contain more CPUs, more optical drives etc. When we visit a company’s server room or a server farm, we will notice that for the control of the air temperature energy consuming air conditioners must be used all the year.

So research into computers that use less energy while providing the required performance is very important. In this way the ICT sector can set an example in the fight against climate change.