Thou Shalt not Pollute, Religions Join the Green Movement

I wasn't going to blog on this, but given I saw 2 articles it caught my attention.  Government regulations were something which I believe is going to change the behavior of businesses, but now religions have joined the Green effort. 

Can you imagine the confession from an energy wasting data center CIO?  Maybe this is a good way to get the attention of executives the 10 energy wasting sins in a data center.

The first article has the Vatican listing pollution as a sin.

Vatican lists new sins, including pollution

Top official also cites drugs, genetic manipulations and economic injustices

updated 12:42 p.m. PT, Mon., March. 10, 2008

VATICAN CITY - In olden days, the deadly sins included lust, gluttony and greed. Now, the Catholic Church says pollution, mind-damaging drugs and genetic experiments are on its updated thou-shalt-not list.

The second article has Southern Baptists leaders signing an environment vow.

Southern Baptist leaders sign environment vow

'Actions have often been too timid,' especially on climate, they say

updated 10:31 p.m. PT, Sun., March. 9, 2008

NEW YORK - In a major shift, a group of Southern Baptist leaders said their denomination has been “too timid” on environmental issues and has a biblical duty to stop global warming.

What also caught my attention is the grass roots support that drove part of the change at the Southern Baptists.

Student rallied leaders
The last Southern Baptist statement on global warming came at the denomination’s 2007 annual meeting, which approved a statement questioning the belief that humans are largely to blame for climate change and warning that increased regulation of greenhouse gases will hurt the poor.

Even so, Jonathan Merritt, a student at Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary, began rallying denominational leaders to take a different approach. Merritt, 25, son of former convention president James Merritt, said a theology class had inspired him.

His professor had compared destroying God’s creation to “tearing a page out of the Bible.”

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Computer Architecture developed for Speed and Power

Micorsoft Research has another project which can change the data center, and make in Greener.  The following are excerpts from their post.  Chuck Thacker is the architect behind the project and as an experienced computer architect who gets how power is an issue in computer architectures and data centers. Chuck is one of the Microsoft Research people who has an interest in what is going on in Microsoft data centers.

Indeed, speed and power are the two attributes Thacker hopes the BEE3 system can help address.

“One of the big problems that we face as a company is that it’s become increasingly clear that processors aren’t going to get faster,” he says. “They dissipate too much power now, and it’s a real challenge to get rid of it. We want to look at some of these new architectures as possibilities for solving those two problems, the speed problem and the power problem.”

And, his colleague John Davis is working on the instrumentation for the system. 

“One of the nice things about these systems is that they can be very intricately instrumented, so we can get a lot of data.”

“They designed the case of the system,” Thacker says. “They designed the heat sinks for the FPGAs and did all the computational fluid-dynamic modeling to make sure that it would all work. That is one of the largest mistakes you can make in designing a computer system, to get the thermal properties wrong, because then it overheats and doesn’t work. Function was enormously helpful in this area.”

A dream scenario is these guys leave the option to have instrumentation embedded in the design if they go to production.

Another way to solve the power utilization issue is to build custom computers.

The viability of the FPGA approach was demonstrated last summer, when Zhangxi Tan, then an intern at Microsoft Research Silicon Valley, built a system for solving the problem of binary satisfiability, commonly used in design automation.

“He got speed of about 40 times what a computer could do,” Thacker reports, “because the algorithm is exactly suited for what can be done in FPGAs.”

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Political Jockeying around Colorado River Water, $30 - 35 million dollar event

Water is a critical resource, and allocation is a political battle for its use.  This problem has been occuring in the Southeast as well as the Southwest. The NYtimes writes about a 60-hour release of water to improve the fish environment in the Grand Canyon with an electricity cost of $30 - 35 million dollars to replace.

Torrent in Colorado River Is Unleashed to Aid Fish

Matt York/Associated Press

At the Glen Canyon Dam in Page, Ariz., water jetted into the Colorado River on Wednesday to benefit fish in the Grand Canyon.

The 60-hour release, being presided over by Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne, was the latest chapter in a long-running tug of war between the department’s Bureau of Reclamation, which controls the two major Colorado River dams, and the National Park Service over how to balance the Southwest’s need for hydroelectric power against the needs of an endangered fish, the humpbacked chub, for water flows that mimic the natural rhythms of the river.

The water poured out of the dam as if pumped through a gigantic fire hose, at the rate of 41,500 cubic feet per second — enough to fill the Empire State Building in 20 minutes. This release, which engineers call “high flow,” was meant to scour the river bottom and deposit silt and sediment to rebuild and extend sandbars and create new, calm backwater areas where the fish can spawn.

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Green IT Consulting will Mushroom, $4.8 Billion by 2013, says Forrester

News.com has post on Green the latest opportunity for consulting firms, and cites Forrester Research:

Green IT consulting will mushroom into a $4.8 billion industry by 2013, according to Forrester Research. The firm polled 130 companies and found that only six used a green IT service provider, but that 6 percent more were planning on it, and another 18 percent were considering it.

Some of the beneficiaries could be firms like Accenture, Deloitte, and EDS, which will start to provide holistic advice on energy efficiency and green corporate practices. IBM already has put together a fairly large effort to capture some of this work and is working with traditional IT customers but also utilities.

I wonder if HP is smiling about its acquisition of EYP.

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Google Demolishes Presbyterian Church, do no evil?

InformationWeek has a picture gallery of Google's data center construction in Council Bluffs, Iowa.  One interesting picture for company with the motto of do no evil is below where a Presbyterian Church will be demolished as part of the construction.  A funny point made by one blogger is do no evil  is an anagram for o no devil seems to be appropriate.

Nearby Presbyterian Church will be demolished.

Photo Gallery: Google's Iowa Data Center Emerges

Nearby Presbyterian Church will be demolished.

Photograph by Joshua White/The Daily Nonpareil

For the curious, the reporter also has pictures of the Google The Dalles facility.

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