Internet energy

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jean63
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Internet energy




by jean63 » 05/03/08, 12:31

Internet, a virtual world with real energy voracity

What is the common point between a virtual character from Second Life and a resident of Brazil? Both consume on average the same amount of electricity each year, a comparison that illustrates the energy voracity of the internet.

To "live", the "avatars" of Second Life, these characters that anyone can create and evolve in a world on the internet imitating real life, need giant data centers (data centers), extremely greedy in energy .

Reducing the appetite of the gigantic "computer farms" that line up thousands of square meters of cables and computers with phenomenal computing capacities, which continuously store and transmit the data of Internet users around the world, is one of the challenges of the world. high technology sector, gathered this week at the Cebit trade fair in Hanover (north).

There is no shortage of striking comparisons on these "farms".

Siegfried Behrendt, a researcher at the Berlin research institute IZT, calculated that downloading on his computer the electronic version of his favorite daily newspaper consumed as much electricity as washing clothes.

The German IT services company Strato argues for its part a search on the Google site is equivalent to one hour of light delivered by a light bulb energy saving.

In all these actions, the electricity consumption of the user's computer is nothing compared to that of the giant server that will manage the transaction.

In a study commissioned by component maker AMD, Stanford University in the United States calculated that the world's largest "computer farms" run 14 power plants each year. Between 2000 and 2005, their electricity consumption doubled.

Dresden University (East) Gerhard Fettweis judges that at this rate, in less than a quarter of a century, the internet alone will consume as much energy as all humanity todayhe told the weekly WirtschafstWoche.

By 2010, "everything is possible. Either nothing changes, and the consumption of data centers increases by another 50%. Either real efforts are made, and there it is a reduction of 50% which is possible", Siegfried Behrendt told AFP.

On their Cebit stands, placed this year under the sign of "green" technology, the giants of the IT sector are already presenting innovations intended to improve the ecological balance of data centers.

The American IBM boasts a prototype that avoids the waste of energy in the form of heat, one of the main challenges for these powerful computers, constantly air-conditioned to prevent overheating.

IBM has developed a cooling system on the same principle as that of power plants, and proposes to use the heat recovered as heating.

In the United States, the last giant "computer farms", for example that of the world leader in software Microsoft in Quincy (north-west), which covers the equivalent of seven football fields, are being built on the north-west coast, near hydraulic power stations, for ecological reasons.

A final avenue is that of "virtualization": it is a question of using sophisticated software to make several operating systems or applications work on a single machine, exactly as if several computers were running at the same time.

The goal is to reduce the number of hardware servers needed to store data or process information. And therefore reduce the impact on the environment.


source http://www.orange.fr/bin/frame.cgi?u=ht ... eelle.html
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by Christophe » 05/03/08, 12:46

Another hot news and remixed to the taste of the day?

I am sorry to have to learn the job of analysis to the journalist but at the level of energy intensity I think the internet (just like computing in general) is very well placed...In other words: much less energy is consumed to create "wealth" in IT than in traditional industry.

For example Internet allows to work from home for a lot of people. In fact, teleworking should be much more developed than that ...

Another example, the Internet allows to have access to the largest database of the world humanity without leaving his room ... ie without using transport ....

In short easy to count only part of the problem ... this article reminds me of other article about electric cars ZEROEMISSION powered by a coal power station ... : Mrgreen:

ps:

a search on the Google site is equivalent to one hour of light delivered by a light bulb energy saving.


I do not believe it for a second ... I would like NUMBERS ...
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by elephant » 05/03/08, 13:48

I am of your opinion: being able to be informed at a distance generates great savings of time, money and unnecessary travel.
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by Christine » 05/03/08, 17:28

Critical Spirit are you there?

Example:
Siegfried Behrendt, a researcher at the Berlin research institute IZT, calculated that downloading on his computer the electronic version of his favorite daily newspaper consumed as much electricity as washing clothes.

1- we do not download ALL its daily but we consult the articles that interest us
2- energy balance higher than say 400g paper + ink + transport + unsold + etc? Be serious !

While it is true that the internet is energy intensive and requires "gear" to a certain extent, it allows:
1 - a dematerialization of the supports (example of the daily newspaper)
2 - access to a gigantic amount of knowledge, impossible otherwise.

In any case, I hope that orange.fr uses servers zéropollution to disseminate this kind of articles, because there, indeed it would be waste.
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by Louhac » 05/03/08, 19:17

I'm not so sure that the examples provided in the article are so unfounded that, the more people who use an internet service more servers must be powerful and so yes, the surfer who comes to add to the together has a responsibility in the consumption of these servers.
In addition there are other energy consumptions that are generated by internet. By the simple fact that the internet creates new needs. A good example is the machines that run 24 hours a day just to download files. Likewise all computers that turn for fun activities. Personally I admit to wasting a lot of time on the internet and thus unnecessarily running my computer for this purpose.
As for the savings generated by dematerialization and teleworking, I think we really have to calculate everything and not oversimplify.
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by Christophe » 05/03/08, 19:28

Obviously, but to compare the energy cost of a click on google at a time of lighting ...

I bet guys have taken the energy consos of all google service divided by the number of clicks ... not very serious ...

Again we could apply the looping method on gray energy ... and the cost of servers.

6000 people use econology every day approximately and our server costs 1200 € TTC per year. Let us assume that 50% of the rental of the server is energy or 500 € HT per year. 5000kWh bill. 8760h per year or 570W permanently ... or a server like the one on the site (not too powerful) is 120W max. The% "gray energy" is therefore much lower than 50% ...

Have fun calculating what a PAPER version read by 6000 person per day would cost in money and therefore energy ...I bet only editing, distributing and recycling a newspaper to 6000 * 7 = 42 000 person = 42 000 copies = a few tons of paper on a week is 1 server year ...

So obviously the needs of the internet are growing but that largely offsets other expenses ...
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