Green Computing

Data centers extremely wasteful – Need energy to power – Need energy to cool 1000 racks, 25,000 sq ft, 10MW for computing, 5MW to dissipate heat Need a system more efficient, less expensive strategy with immediate impact on energy consumption

Data Centers -2006/7 Focus by green computing movement on data centers (SUVs of the tech world) Study started in 2006 – Don’t know how many data centers in US – 61B kWh of energy – Cost: $4.5 B (more than used by all color TVs in US) – In 2007, DOE reported data centers 1.5% of all electricity in US – Greenhouse gas emission projected to more than double from 2007 to 2020

Goal Within a few years, cost of power for data center was expected to exceed cost of original capital investment Fed. Gov. wanted data center energy consumption to be reduced by at least 10% – Same as energy consumed by 1M average US households

In 2015 – Data Centers How many data centers in 2015? There are about 3 M data centers – Will peak in 2017 at 8.6 M then decline Used for 30B kWh to 100 B kWh from

Current state Hyperscale cloud data centers (Google, etc.) represent < 5% of US data centers – are very efficient Global amounts: – ve/2014/01/dcd-industry-census-2013-data- center-power ve/2014/01/dcd-industry-census-2013-data- center-power Small, medium, corporate, multitenant data centers still squander huge amounts of energy

Definitions From eaton – Small data center: fewer than 40 enclosures – Medium: as many as 200 enclosures Hyperscale – millions of servers? AFCOM white paper describes data center size by compute space, and density by measured peak kilowatt (kW) load. (DCISE data center institute standards endorsed)

Current state (2014)- The Negative Key findings from the NRDC-Anthesis report include: – Up to 30 percent of servers are “comatose” and no longer needed because projects have ended or business processes changed, but are still plugged in and consuming electricity. – Much of the energy consumed by U.S. data centers powers servers operating at 12 to 18 percent of capacity. Even sitting virtually idle, servers use significant amounts of power 24/7. – In 80 percent of organizations, the department responsible for data center management is separate from the one paying the electric bills. This “split incentive” reduces the likelihood of implementation of commonsense efficiency measures.

The Positive The 6.8% power increase across the industry this year is less than previously predicted and means that the forecast through 2016 has been reduced by about 1,000MW: from 14,330MW down to 13,250MW.

Servers – Rarely completely idle – Seldom operate at maximum – 10-50% of max utilization levels – 100% utilization not acceptable for meeting throughput, etc. – no slack time

Servers – Completely idle server waste of capital Difficult to idle subset of servers – Servers need to be available Perform background tasks Move data around Can help recovery of crash – Applications can be restructured to create idle intervals Difficult, hard to maintain – Devices with highest energy savings, highest wake-up penalty, e.g disk spin up

One Solution - Energy proportional servers

Previously proposed Sources of computing power in remote server warehouses Located near renewable energy sources – wind, solar Usage shifts across globe depending on where energy most abundant

Current approaches Some “low hanging fruit” approaches – Orient racks of servers to exhaust in a uniform direction Higher fruit - Microsoft – Built near hydroelectric power in WA – Built in Ireland - can air cool, 50% more energy efficient – Countries with favorable climates: Canada, Finland, Sweden and Switzerland

Current approaches Google – trying to reduce carbon footprint Carbon footprint includes direct fuel use, purchased electricity and business travel, employee commuting, construction, server manufacturing – According to Google, its data centers use ½ industry’s average amount of powerGoogle – How? Ultra efficient evaporative cooling (customized) Yahoo (are they back??) – Data centers also carbon-neutral because of use of carbon offsets

Current approaches US government – EPA has phase-one of Energy Star standards for servers – Measure server power supply efficiency and energy consumption while idle – Must also measure energy use at peak demand Green Grid consortium – Dell, IBM, Sun VM-Wear AMD Green500 – 500 most green supercomputers – Two heterogeneous systems, based on NVIDIA’s Kepler K20 GPU accelerators, claim the top two positions

Data Center Product Specification Completion – Energy Star 2009 – Servers v – Data Center Buildings Program 2012 – UPS v1.0 (uninterruptable power supply) 2013 – Servers 2.0 – Storage v – Large Network Equipment v – Data Center Cooling Equipment v1.0

Data Center Metrics Metrics – SPECPowerjbb benchmark and DCiE from Green Grid Green Grid – group of IT professionals – Power Usage Effectiveness PUE PUE = Total facility power/IT equipment power – Data Center infrastructure Efficiency metric DCiE 1/PUE

Current approaches Replace old computers with new more energy- efficient But manufacturing through day-to-day uses energy Dell - reducing hazardous substances in computers, OptiPlex 50% more energy efficient Greenest computer company – VirtualBoxImages What is “Greenest computer ever” ? – Is MacBook air (pro) greenest?

Current State – The Bad Computers have become more efficient, but also require more energy: A 1995 microprocessor running 24×7 would consume about 40 pounds of coal a year (assuming 50% of the electricity comes from coal, about the national and global average). Fast forward to a 2012 CPU that runs 30 times faster, and we find that it requires 10 times as much power. But run the 2012 processor 24×7 and you burn 400 pounds of coal a year. (Forbes )Forbes

Current State – The Bad When first introduced, the US avg PUE was >2.4, meaning that for every Watt going to a server, 1.4 Watts was being used in the facility or mostly by the Air Conditioning. Today, datacenters built by eBay, Yahoo, Google, Microsoft, and Facebook are seeing that PUE <1.2. ( Although most new PCs are ENERGY STAR rated and have power management features, ENERGY STAR estimates that only 5% of PCs actually have those features activated. (Energy Star)Energy Star

Current State – The Bad The average desktop PC wastes half of the energy it consumes. Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory reports that the typical PC is in use only four hours each workday and sits idle for more than five hours. ( Computers and monitors represent 66% of the electrical load in the average office. According to Forrester Research, information technology professionals report that PCs use about 10 percent more electricity than data centers. (California Energy Commission)California Energy Commission

Current State

Goals for Future 1.Consider energy to manufacture, operate, dispose of 2.Sense and optimize world around us 3.Predict and respond to future events by modeling behavior (grown in performance) 4.Benefit of digital alternative to physical activities – E-newspapers, online shopping Personal energy meter??