Energy Efficient Mermaid (Mobile Earthquake Recorder in Marine Areas)

One of the areas where Energy Efficiency is in their DNA are remote sensor engineers. The Microsoft Research team who wrote this paper are responsible for sensorweb and were Xerox PARC guys.

I found this article on the Economist, and it reminds me of some people who are investigating battery operated sensors in the data center to collect power and environmental data. Why would someone go with battery power, because the easier you can install a device in data center on its own network and power, the easier it is to deploy. The costs to deploy monitoring solutions that assume they'll plug into the existing data center network infrastructure will many times be more than the cost of the equipment.

To do that, they need to float near the sea floor, since most of an earthquake's energy travels through the rock rather than the water. So a Mermaid can operate at a depth of up to 1,500 metres (about a mile). When she hears something that might be pertinent, she runs the signal through her on-board computer to decide just how significant it really is. If it does turn out to be significant, she surfaces by pumping air into a bladder and makes contact with a satellite that has been co-opted into the project. Once she has delivered her message, the air is sucked back out of the bladder and she returns to her gloomy underwater station.

The main engineering problem Dr Simons faces—apart from making something that will work reliably in the salty ocean depths—is energy conservation. When a Mermaid runs out of power, she dies. That power is provided by lithium-ion batteries and is reckoned sufficient for between 50 and 100 surfacings.

One of the ways Dr Simons saves power is in the computer. The decision to surface is made by an algorithm that depends on a mathematical function called a wavelet. This divides an earthquake wave into separate components which can be studied independently. That allows the computer to restrict energy-intensive high-resolution analyses to those sections of the waves that really need it. The other sections receive a more cursory (and thus less power-consuming) glance.

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Industry Leader Roll Call* at The Green Grid Technical Forum - Microsoft...Here; Yahoo...Here;Google... Google... Is Google Here?

The Green Grid Forum held a Technical Forum in SF Feb 5 - 6, 2008.

An unprecedented opportunity to "Get Connected to Efficient IT", The Green Grid Technical Forum is a unique industry event designed to bring members and other industry stakeholders together to further The Green Grid’s mission of advancing energy efficiency in data centers and business computing ecosystems.  Attendees will learn about The Green Grid’s Data Center Metrics, current and emerging techniques for managing data centers for efficiency and future technical deliverables from the organization.  The Green Grid will also host discussions with leading industry policy-makers from around the world.

Part of going Green in a Data Center is to figure out what works, and this event was a great opportunity for industry leaders to exchange ideas. There were over 300 attendees registered for the event, including the biggest of data center operators; Microsoft, Yahoo, and Google. Well, not Google as they didn't show up. Which is confusing given Google's claims of being an environmental leader. Google's Green Energy Czar says

we launched the Climate Savers Computing Initiative, which aims to set efficiency standards for power supplies and dc-to-dc converters, both for servers and also for desktops. It’s about taking what we’ve done on the server side and getting some of the same efficiency improvements on the desktop side where there’s a huge opportunity in terms of total savings.

Google's motto is "do no evil." Given Google operates more servers than anyone else should "do no evil" include participating in The Green Grid Technical Forum? Google has taken on the environmental task by starting projects like Renewable Energy Initiatives, but wouldn't it be better if Google helped validate data center best practices?

Why didn't Google join The Green Grid?

As a side, someone saw Microsoft's Christian Belady, talking to Yahoo's Christina Page.That would have been a fun conversation to list to.

* I was just joking about the roll call analogy.

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BusinessWeek Summarizes Green IT Corporate Strategies

Business week summarizes recent reports from Gartner, Forrester, McKinsey in one article. It starts with an attention getting paragraph.

At the recent World Economic Forum's annual meeting in Davos, Switzerland, 20 sessions focused on environmental issues. On Jan. 24 a group of top guns at leading technology companies, including Microsoft (MSFT) co-founder Bill Gates, Dell (DELL) founder and CEO Michael Dell, Cisco Systems (CSCO) CEO John Chambers, and Intel (INTC) Chairman Craig Barrett, met to talk about the possibility of coordinating their efforts to pursue more sustainable practices. Then, on Feb. 5, Hewlett-Packard (HPQ) announced it had surpassed its goals for recycling e-waste: Globally, it recycled nearly 250 million pounds of hardware and print cartridges in 2007—a 50% increase over the previous year. And it announced a new goal: to reuse 2 billion pounds of products by the end of 2010.

And summarizes the reports as follows:

Whereas Forrester and Gartner's reports concentrated on green IT, the McKinsey report focuses on a broader sense of energy efficiency, to include office buildings as well as devices and products. The authors argue that implementing such energy efficiencies could offset 85% of projected energy demands by 2030. That's considerably more impact than increasing fuel efficiency in vehicles, replacing industrial equipment and industrial processes that are not energy efficient, planting forests and improving soil, or shifting toward renewable energy sources. Citing projections from the Energy Dept., the report's authors state that overall energy use in commercial environments is predicted to rise at 1.6% each year for the next 22 years. The energy used in offices full of PCs and power-guzzling devices is expected to grow at twice that rate.

What each of the three reports share is statistics that make it clear reducing expenses is the leading reason corporations are seeking more eco-friendly practices. Forrester's report, for instance, states that 55% of those surveyed see reducing their energy-related operating expenses as the main reason for pursuing more sustainable IT operations—above "doing the right thing for the environment," the top motivator for 50% of those polled. In the Gartner report the authors estimate that "potential power cost and CO2 emission reductions of 50% are available" by better managing the power usage of PCs, monitors, and printers—for instance, simply encouraging employees to turn them off.

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