On the 19th of March 2008 I attended a conference at the Said Business School Oxford University called “ICT Towards low carbon emission”.

Many interesting topics were discussed with regards to the impact that Information Technology has on the consumption of energy and production of CO2. Particular attention was given to the implementation of large data-centres, including the cooling of cabinets of server machines and the utilisation of the respective hardware (storage, processing etc) for a given task. DR. Peter Wagget of IBM Emerging Technology Services was present to discuss new efforts that are put into developing ways to make our machines perform in a more “planet friendly” fashion. Juergen Heidegger, the Director of ICT Infrastructure Products at Fujitsu Siemens Computers presented as well. Martin Chilcott, Founder and CEO of Meltwater Ventures, presented a new approach to social groups on the internet, focusing on “green business innovation” with the, soon to be launched, “2Degrees” g-business network open to participants interested in sharing ideas, products and expertise on anything CO2 friendly.

Two of the most interesting presentations were by Liam Newcombe of the British Computer Society Data Centre Specialist Group and by Daniel Curtis on the Evaluation Lead on the Low Carbon ICT project.

Liam discussed the current situation and possible improvements in Data-centres by making use of better planning and by maximising server throughput. He discussed some very interesting projects such as the Green Grid as well as highlight obvious problems that can no longer be disregarded such as Cooling and use of Air-conditioning systems. Just think that currently with the energy used by just over 100 servers in a poorly designed data-centre you could drive a BMW 750 series approximately 40,000,000 Km, the equivalent of 100 times around the earth or 5 times to the moon … with its air conditioning on!!

Example of the peak consumption of energy using 3 different Data centre approaches over the course of 4 years:

Daniel Curtis discussed a project currently run at the Oxford Environmental Change Institute directed at designing hardware that will enable PCs that are not being used into a much more energy efficient state than current power management solutions are capable of. He also mentioned that the average PC consumes approx. 76W of energy under normal load and approx 114W of energy under full load (for example 100% CPU).

After the conference a thought came to my mind…. Think of a recent outbreak of a well known worm, -STORM-. In only a few days, 1.6 Million PCs were reported to be infected, resulting in compromised machines running well above “normal operation” loads therefore consuming more energy!

Allow me to speculate a little……

The difference between normal load and heavy load is approximately 38 Watts. So if only 50% of the machines infected were running at “heavy load” due to the nature of the exploit hitting them (for example a PUP running fake AV or loads of advertising pop-ups). This would equate to: 900.000 PCs * 38watts = 32,400,000 watts wasted on some malicious application. Of course I am not even considering the amount of energy used by all the routers and network equipment across the globe going crazy dealing with abnormal increase in unwanted traffic.

Without using complex calculation and just to give an impression of what the potential for this wasted energy could be, with the above 32 megawatts I could end up powering my “small” 3 bedroom house for approximately 8 years without having to pay my current electricity supplier and during this time watching a whole load of wide screen TV with a plentiful supply of hot tea.

Efforts in creating awareness for the problem of carbon emission are being made by companies throughout the world more and more and they are starting to show their value. An interesting example is from Google last week. When summertime kicked in they made their well known white homepage dress in black for the occasion. This is because monitors are known to use less energy while using Black versus White screen (approximately 15 watt less).

Here is an example of a “copycat” search engine called “BLACKLE”:

So the moral is pretty simple: I am going to keep a good AV solution on my black desktop to keep my files safe and at the same time make the planet a little greener. Clean surfing folks!!!