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