Going green with e-Infrastructures

Information Communication Technologies (ICTs) are found in all aspects of our lives, from health and science to transport and manufacturing. But the widespread use of ICTs has come at a price: the ICT sector is estimated to produce two percent of Europe’s carbon emissions, a figure equal to that produced by the aviation industry. And, as the ICT industry continues to grow, emissions for the production and use of ICTs are set to rise by six percent a year. To continue to benefit from ICTs we must reduce the sector’s carbon footprint and energy consumption. Cutting emissions is key to sustainable growth in the ICT sector: without it, providers may be forced to pay large fines or offset emissions, potentially leading to unfeasible operation costs.

The transition to an energy-efficient, low carbon economy
But the news is not all bad. In a recent Communication, the European Commission identified ICTs as key to cutting emissions. Entitled ‘Mobilising Information and Communication Technologies to facilitate the transition to an energy-efficient, low carbon economy’, the Communication stated that ICTs can be used to enable energy efficiency improvements and quantify energy consumption. The technological solutions ICTs offer can reduce energy usage, not just in the technology sector, but across the whole economy. For example, by improving logistics, ICTs could help increase the efficiency of travel, therefore reducing emissions by 27%.
However, engaging the help of e-Infrastructures offers one of the best hopes for greening the ICT sector.

Virtually green
Innovative technologies such as grid computing, cloud computing and virtualisation are being touted as some of the best ways to reduce redundancy, and therefore, energy consumption.
Virtualisation, for example, allows users to run multiple applications using multiple operating systems, all on the same physical computer. This can maximise server capacity, cutting the number of machines required to process information, and so cutting power consumption too. Many see virtualisation as the future of IT, with organisations outsourcing their computational needs, rather than dealing with them in-house. However, companies need to ensure they are not simply offloading their emissions to another source, but are instead enabling dedicated server hosts to aggregate their processing needs onto a smaller number of machines. In many cases, moving to the cloud has already reduced the number of servers required. An example is Mimecast, a company that provides cloud-based email management. By moving electronic communications to the cloud, Mimecast users have eliminated an estimated 8,300 servers worldwide.

Towards more eco-friendly data centres
While e-Infrastructures can offer a way to cut power consumption, a move to cloud computing must be carefully managed. Aggregating processing needs could actually increase energy consumption, due to the cooling requirements of large data centres owned by cloud providers. This is a major problem: data centres are estimated to account for three percent of the world’s energy consumption. Many providers and organisations are already taking steps to reduce this, finding more eco-friendly ways to run data centres. Using renewable energy – as well as simple measures such as using thicker cabling, ‘free cooling’ using outside air, and leaving more space around processors  – can help reduce emissions and power consumption.
Increasingly, plans for new centres are taking green issues into consideration, not least because going green also reduces operating costs. For example, plans for a new computer centre at CERN will likely use green design, water cooling, and energy reuse that could redirect excess energy to the heating systems of nearby buildings.
Researchers are already looking for ways that e-Infrastructures can adapt to meet the growing demand for reduced energy consumption. For example, the GREEN-NET project, supported by INRIA, is scheduling jobs on the grid in a way that reduces energy consumption. Their research has found that scheduling jobs at quiet times and following green policies can dramatically reduce energy usage. For a platform like Grid’5000 in France, GREEN-NET methods can yield energy savings of 30-35% a year. The OpenNebula initiative is also working to reduce power usage: their newly developed consolidation scheduler allows grid services to run on fewer physical machines, cutting both power use and cooling requirements.
Although a reduction in energy consumption should lead to a cut in emissions, providers must ensure that in response, they don’t simply increase the load on machines. Nevertheless e-Infrastructures can play a key role in helping the ICT industry reduce rather than add to carbon emissions. By going green we can realise many benefits for our environment, our budgets and a sustainable future.