eBay is Carbon Neutral Since 2007, Why? 1,000 Passionate Green Employees

Found this press release on eBay’s Green team.  I’ve always believed Green efforts are more credible when coming from the grassroots of employees who want to make a difference.

The eBay Green Team initiative grew out of a grassroots effort begun in 2007 by a small group of passionate eBay employees who wanted to put their environmental values to work. Today, more than 1,000 eBay employees in 18 countries are Green Team members, supporting environmental causes in their local communities and championing sustainable business practices within eBay. When the company needed more office space, the Green Team led eBay to construct the first building built to LEED Gold Standards in San Jose, CA, featuring the city's largest solar panel installation. eBay has also been a carbon neutral company since 2007 through commitments to energy efficiency, alternative power, green buildings and carbon offsets, thanks to efforts by the eBay Green Team.

The last sentence is little known.  eBay has been carbon neutral since 2007.  Why? What is the business justification? Try stopping 1,000 passionate green employees who want to make a difference and think their company should be carbon neutral.

Curious I went to one of my earliest blog entries on eWaste which was about eBay’s rethink web site.  In that entry the list of companies on eBay’s rethink site were.

Apple, Best Buy,Circuit City, Dell, HP, Motorola, Nokia, Toshiba, UPS, USPS, Verizon.

Now the list has grown.

*One bug, don’t know quite what defines new, but the list had BestBuy, Circuit City, and Toshiba on the web site in 2007, and Mar 2009, the companies are still listed as new.

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Virtualization + Power Management, Intel’s Blog

Intel has a blog entry on Power Management in a Virtualization scenario.  The blog isn’t very long, so I have the whole text below.

The Curious Case of Virtualized Power

Posted by Enrique Castro-Leon on Mar 8, 2009 5:44:22 PM

Given the recent intense focus in the industry around data center power management and the furious pace of the adoption of virtualization, it is remarkable that the subject of power management in virtualized environments has received relatively little attention.

It is fair to say that power management technology has not caught with virtualization.

Here are a few thoughts on this particular subject, which I intend to elaborate in subsequent transmittals.

For historical reasons the power management technology available today had its inception in the physical world where watts consumed in a server can be traced to the watts that came through the power utility feeds.  Unfortunately, the semantics of power in virtual  machines have yet to be comprehensively defined to industry consensus.

For instance, assume that the operating system running  in a virtual image decides to transition the system to the ACPI S3 state, sleep to memory.  What we have now is the state of the virtual image preserved in the image's memory with the virtual CPU turned off.

Assuming that the system is not paravirtualized, the operating system can't tell if it's running in a physical or virtual instance. The effect of transitioning to S3 will be purely local to the virtual machine.  If the intent of the system operator was to transition the machine to S3 to save power, it does not work this way.   The virtual machine still draws resources from the host machine and requires hypervisor attention. Transitioning the host itself to S3 may not be practical as there might be other virtual machines still running, not ready to go to sleep.

Consolidation is another technology for reducing data center power consumption by driving up the server utilization rates.  Consolidation for power management is a blunt tool, where applications that used to run in a physical server are now virtualized and squished into a single physical host.  The applications are sometimes strange bedfellows.  Profiling might have been done to make sure they could coexist, as a priori, static exercise with the virtual machine instances treated as black boxes. There is no attempt to look at the workload profiles inside each virtualized instance and in real time.  Power savings come from an almost wishful side effect of repackaging applications formerly running in a dedicated server into virtualized instances.

A capability to map power to virtual machines, in both directions, from physical to virtual and virtual to physical would be useful from an operational perspective.  The challenge is twofold, first from a monitoring perspective because there is no commonly agreed method yet to prorate host power consumption to the virtual instances running within, and second from a control perspective.  It would be useful to schedule or assign power consumption to virtual machines, allowing end users tomake a tradeoff between power and performance.  Fine grained power monitoring would allow prorating power costs to application instances, introducing useful pricing checks and balances encouraging energy consumption instead of the more common method today of hiding energy costs in the facility costs.

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Save Data Center Energy with a PowerNap?

University of Michigan is about to publish a paper on PowerNap as a technique to save data center power.

PowerNap plan could save 75 percent of data center energy
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ANN ARBOR, Mich.—Putting idle servers to sleep when they're not in use is part of University of Michigan researchers' plan to save up to 75 percent of the energy that power-hungry computer data centers consume.


Data centers, central to the nation's cyberinfrastructure, house computing, networking and storage equipment. Each time you make an ATM withdrawal, search the Internet or make a cell phone call, your request is routed through a data center.


Thomas Wenisch, assistant professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, and students David Meisner and Brian Gold will present a paper about improving the energy efficiency of data center computer systems on March 10 at the International Conference on Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems in Washington, D.C.


Wenisch and the students analyzed data center workloads and power consumption and used mathematical modeling to develop their approach.
The approach includes PowerNap, the plan to put idle servers to sleep, and RAILS, a more efficient power supplying technique. (RAILS stands for Redundant Array for Inexpensive Load Sharing.)

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Environmentalists Sue To Stop Coal Plants, Renewables Gain from Stimulus

MSNBC.com has an article on coal’s issues.

King Coal's reign challenged in courts, D.C.

Environmentalists sue, lawmakers use stimulus for cleaner renewables

Image: Coal-fired power plant

This coal-fired power plant is one of some 600 across the U.S. that provide half of the country's electricity. Coal companies are scrambling after federal subsidies to develop cleaner coal — a strategy they hope will end the beating the industry is taking over climate change.

updated 22 minutes ago

BILLINGS, Mont. - Beneath the frozen plains of eastern Montana and Wyoming lie the largest coal deposits in the world — enough to last the United States more than a century at the nation's current burn rate.

The fuel literally spills from the ground where streambanks cut into the earth, hinting at reserves estimated at 180 billion tons. But even here lawsuits over global warming and the changing political landscape in Washington are pummeling an industry that has long been the backbone of America's power supply.

How bad is it?  Here are few examples of changes in coal plants.

In recent weeks, a group of rural Montana electric co-ops abandoned a partially built 250-megawatt coal plant, ending a four-year legal campaign by environmentalists to stop the project. The co-ops plan to instead get their electricity from a natural gas plant — more expensive for customers but also more likely to get built.

A few miles away, the U.S. Air Force dropped plans for a major coal-to-jet fuel plant once touted as the harbinger of a new market for coal. There are no signs it will be revived.

Other plants are moving forward in Montana and at least a dozen other states, but the exodus from coal has hit every corner of the country. On Thursday, two more were shelved — plants in Iowa and Nevada that would have generated enough power for 1.6 million homes.

In Nevada, LS Power said it was postponing a 1,600 megawatt coal plant and will instead focus on tapping the state's geothermal, wind and solar potential. Iowa's Interstate Power and Light dropped a 630 megawatt plant as it pursues a 200 megawatt wind farm.

"In the last year the world has changed 180 degrees," said Bruce Nilles, director of the Sierra Club's "Beyond Coal" campaign.

But coal still produces 50% of the US’s electricity.

Still provides half of electricity
But Lucas and other point out that despite the setbacks, the coal-fired power industry continues to enjoy its largest expansion in three decades. The Department of Energy tallies 28 plants now under construction.

They will join an estimated 600 coal plants that currently provide about half of the nation's electricity. The rest comes from a mix of natural gas, fuel oil and renewables such as wind and geothermal.

The Sierra Club's Nilles acknowledged his group's anti-coal campaign has so far made little headway with existing coal plants. Those plants produce about 2 billion tons annually of the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide — roughly a third of the United States' total global warming emissions.

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The Coming of the Megacomputer

Nichols Carr has a post on a Financial Times interview.

The coming of the megacomputer

March 06, 2009

Here's an incredible, and telling, data point. In a talk yesterday, reports the Financial Times' Richard Waters, the head of Microsoft Research, Rick Rashid, said that about 20 percent of all the server computers being sold in the world "are now being bought by a small handful of internet companies," including Microsoft, Google, Yahoo and Amazon.

Recently, total worldwide server sales have been running at around 8 million units a year. That means that the cloud giants are gobbling up more than a million and a half servers annually. (What's not clear is how Google fits into these numbers, since last I heard it was assembling its own servers rather than buying finished units.)

Waters says this about Rashid's figure: "That is an amazing statistic, and certainly not one I’d heard before. And this is before cloud computing has really caught on in a big way." What we're seeing is the first stage of a rapid centralization of data-processing power - on a scale unimaginable before. At the same time, of course, the computing power at the edges, ie, in the devices that we all use, is also growing rapidly. An iPhone would have qualified as a supercomputer a few decades ago. But because the user devices draw much of their functionality (and data) from the Net, it's the centralization trend that's the key one in reshaping computing today.

I’ve taken it for granted that Microsoft, Google, Amazon, and Yahoo are the server buyers and it was known these guys are the setting the server standards now.

Rick Rashid mentions a shift.

Rashid also pointed out, according to Waters, that "every time there’s a transition to a new computer architecture, there’s a tendency simply to assume that existing applications will be carried over (ie, word processors in the cloud).

But other shifts are in what is the megacomputer. This week I got a chance to see Jason Banfelder and Vanessa Borcherding from Cornell Medical Biomedicine department, and we were talking about what they were planning next to purchase for their HPC lab.

Jason had tried the Nvidia Tesla and found a 40 times performance gain vs. the x86 based solution.

The world’s first teraflop many-core processor
NVIDIA® Tesla™ GPU computing solutions enable the necessary transition to energy efficient parallel computing power. With 240 cores per processor and based on the revolutionary NVIDIA® CUDA™ parallel computing architecture, Tesla scales to solve the world’s most important computing challenges—more quickly and accurately.

Another interesting choice is the Intel Atom based SGI concept server.

SGI was showing off a new supercomputer project at SC08 last week, it's codenamed Project Molecule and the special thing about it is that it uses the Intel Atom N330 processor. The aim of Project Molecule is to create a supercomputer with ultra high-density, low power consumption and low cost using the ultimate commodity processor that can be easily programmed. SGI says a 3U-high rack can house more than 90 blocks with two dual-core Intel Atom 1.6GHz processor in each block, good for a total of 360 cores. The total power consumption of this system is below 2kW. More info at Tech-On!
The Register has some more info about the performance of Project Molecule:

The concept machine at the SC08 show was a 3U rack that contained 180 of the Atom boards, for a total of 360 cores. These boards would present 720 virtual threads to a clustered application, and have 720 GB of main memory (using 512 MB DDR2 DIMMs mounted on the board) and a total of 720 GB/sec of memory bandwidth. The important thing to realize, explained Brown, is that if the interconnect was architected correctly, the entire memory inside the chassis could be searched in one second. That memory bandwidth, Brown explained, was up to 15 TB/sec per rack, or about 20 times that of a single-rack cluster these days. This setup would be good for applications where cache memory or out-of-order execution don't help, but massive amounts of threads do help. (Search, computational fluid dynamics, seismic processing, stochastic modeling, and others were mentioned).
The other advantages that the Molecule system might have are low energy use and low cost. The aggregate memory bandwidth in a rack of these machines (that's 10,080 cores with 9.8 TB of memory) would deliver about 7 times the GB per second per watt of a rack of x64 servers in a cluster today, according to Brown. On applications where threads rule, the Molecule would do about 7 times the performance per watt of x64 servers, and on SPEC-style floating point tests, it might even deliver twice the performance per watt. On average, SGI is saying performance per watt should be around 3.5 times that of a rack of x64 servers.

And GigaOm today has another processor design.

Daniel Reed, Microsoft’s scalable and multicore computing strategist, calls this a hidden problem that’s just as big as the challenges of developing code that optimizes multicore chips.

Chip firms are aware of the issue. Intel’s Nehalem processor for servers adds more memory on chip for the multiple cores and tried to improve communications on the chip. Firms such as Texas Instruments (a TXN) have tweaked the designs of their ARM-based chips for cell phones to address the issue as well. Freescale has created a “fabric” inside some of its multicore embedded chips so they can share information more efficiently across a variety of cores.

But it’s possible that a straight redesign on the processor side is what’s needed. SiCortex, which makes a specially designed chip for the high-performance computing market, questions whether merely adding more memory, as Intel is doing, is the way to solve the issue. Its solution is closer to creating a communication fabric inside the device that scales with the number of cores that are added.

Combine all these ideas, and it is possible for Google, Amazon, Yahoo, or Microsoft to completely change computing by making the transition to a new platform.

Is the megacomputer going to be driven by one of these companies?

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