Green Options » computing

Green Talk Radio: Green Web Hosting with Solar VPS

Sean Daily — Tue, 18 Aug 2009 13:00:56 +0000

Sean Daily, Green Living Ideas’ Editor-in-Chief, talks with Ross Brouse, founder and owner of Solar Virtualization Technology Group (Solar VTG) and Solar VPS, about green web server hosting for personal and professional applications.

[Courtesy of our friends at GreenLivingIdeas.com]

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Researchers Introduce 22.8 TFlop Energy-Efficient Supercomputer

Ariel Schwartz — Tue, 18 Nov 2008 22:45:40 +0000

Researchers at Virginia Tech’s Center for High-End Computing Systems have built the second version of a supercomputer called System G that runs at 22.8 TFlops. System G uses 325 Mac Pro computers that each have two four-core 2.8 GHz Intel Xeon processors and eight GB of RAM.

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World’s Most Powerful Supercomputer to Help Tackle Global Warming, Develop Renewable Energy

Andrew Williams — Sat, 15 Nov 2008 20:04:04 +0000

The world’s most powerful supercomputer, the Cray XT Jaguar, is to be to used in the quest to fight global warming and develop renewable energy.

The computer, housed in the National Center for Computational Sciences (NCCS) at Oak Ridge National Labs (ORNL), Tennessee, has been upgraded to a staggering 1.64 petaflops - and put at the disposal of some of the world’s leading climate scientists and renewable energy experts.

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Google’s Floating Water and Wind Energy Retrofitted Data Center

Sam Aola Ooko — Thu, 11 Sep 2008 14:41:06 +0000

This week, Ecoworldly celebrates the Water Week, and between September 8 - 14, readers of the blog will be reflecting on a lot of water issues here. But isn’t it exciting that this is also the week that word finally leaked out that Google was patenting a retrofitted floating water and wind energy data center.

What does that mean? According to documents filed at the US Patent and Trademark Office August 28, the Google water-powered data center will be - a system that includes a floating platform-mounted computer data center comprising a plurality of computing units, a sea-based electrical generator in electrical connection with the plurality of computing units, and one or more sea-water cooling units for providing cooling to the plurality of computing units.

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The Looming Internet Energy Crisis

Shirley Siluk Gregory — Wed, 07 May 2008 15:18:58 +0000

If you think the virtual, online world helps reduce energy consumption in the real world (a topic we’ve touched on before here at Green Options Media), think again: a new study by management consulting firm McKinsey & Company provides scary insights into how Internet computing is devouring more and more power and spewing out more and more greenhouse gases.

Based on data from the Uptime Institute, a technology consulting company based in Santa Fe, New Mexico, the McKinsey report finds that, between 2000 and 2006, the amount of energy needed to power data centers doubled, and that consumption is likely to double again by 2012. In the U.S. alone, we would need to build 10 new power plants by 2010 just to meet the growing energy needs of this country’s data centers.

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Dell’s Green Design Idea Contest

Deb Hiett — Tue, 29 Apr 2008 08:01:14 +0000

Scary news: Electronic waste is growing at three times the rate of other household waste, and at a higher toxicity. With the rapid and widespread use of computers and electronic technology in the past thirty years, the impact of all the heavy metals (arsenic, mercury, cadmium, copper, lead, etc.), batteries, plastics, LCD and other screens, etc. going into our landfills and water tables has yet to be determined.

What we do know for sure is that computer companies have to start designing with more environmental concern and foresight.

Good news: Dell has sponsored a “green” design competition, and we get to choose the winner. As part of their “ReGeneration” program, Dell invited design students and individuals “to create a broad range of design concepts and innovations for technology products that demonstrate refreshed approaches and responsible solutions for green computing technologies.”

The five finalists’ designs run the gamut from “Lawnpc,” which creates all the power it needs to operate, to “Sense,” an in-store scanning system that tells you everything about a product’s sustainability and green quotient by its bar code. Take a look, cast your vote (before May 7), and find out more about Dell’s “ReGeneration” aspirations.

Let’s hope Dell puts their considerable power behind even more green solutions when creating their next computing solutions.

[Photo courtesy of Dell, Inc.]