At Google’s Efficient Data Center Summit, there was a panel discussion on Best Practices. Panel members left to right: Ken Brill, James Hamilton, William Tschudi, and Olivier Sanche.

One of the questions for the panel members was on subject of green and sustainability.

Ken Brill gave a practical view of show me the money. Green is overhyped and a clear ROI needs to be established for projects.

Olivier Sanche starts by telling the story of his child telling him how the polar bears are drowning, then he thinks he is potentially building a data center that will have a bigger impact to global warming than any other action he has as an individual.  Olivier tells his team we need to do the right thing, and how we impact the environment is part of the equation.

There were people in the audience nodding their heads as each of the panel members gave their comments, so is there a right answer?  It depends on your view.

One indicator though of what resonated with more people was the number of times Olivier’s views were supported by other presenters during the rest of the event.

It is interesting that in some views it is risk taking to do the right thing for the environment when the financials may not be perfectly clear. Taking small steps to experiment with what does work and how well is a way to manage the risk versus saying no to green efforts.

Is building a Green Data Center a risk or the right thing to do?

Microsoft has their green data center press release.

Google had a their Efficient Data Center event.

eBay has Olivier Sanche speaking up to do the right thing.

On James Hamilton’s blog he mentions a power system workshop.

HotPower '09 Call for Papers

The HotPower ’09 workshop will be held on October 10^th at the same venue and right before the Symposium on Operating Systems Principles (SOSP 2009) at Big Sky Resort Montana. Hotpower recognizes that power is becoming a central issue in the design of all systems from embedded systems to servers for high-scale data centers.

From http://hotpower09.stanford.edu/:

Power is increasingly becoming a central issue in designing systems, from embedded systems to data centers. We do not understand energy and its tradeoff with performance and other metrics very well. This limits our ability to further extend the performance envelope without violating physical constraints related to batteries, power, heat generation, or cooling.

HotPower hopes to provide a forum in which to present the latest research and to debate directions, challenges, and novel ideas about building energy-efficient computing systems. In addition, researchers coming to these issues from fields such as computer architecture, systems and networking, measurement and modeling, language and compiler design, and embedded systems will gain the opportunity to interact with and learn from one another.

This looks like interesting, and I may want to try writing a submission paper and attend the conference. Here is a list of topics the event had.

Topics

Topics of interest related to energy-efficient computing include but are not limited to:

• Instrumentation, measurement, and measurement studies
• Energy and performance profiling, accounting
• Metrics, benchmarks, interfaces
• Principles of power management
• Performance, energy and other resource trade-offs, energy complexity
• Compiler optimization, application design
• System-level optimization, cross-layer coordination
• Load and resource modeling, management
• Scheduling, run-time adaptation, feedback control
• Processor, network, storage, hardware components and architecture
• Reliability and power management
• Application to multi-core, data center, and embedded systems