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Move to a Mainframe, Earn Carbon Credits

Posted by Zonk on from the trade-and-process-process-and-trade dept.

BBCWatcher writes "As Slashdot reported previously, Congress is pushing the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to develop energy efficiency measures for data centers, especially servers. But IBM is impatient: Computerworld notes IBM has signed up Neuwing Energy Ventures, a company trading in energy efficiency certificates, in a first for "green" computing. Now if your company consolidates, say, X86 servers onto an IBM mainframe on top of slashing about 85% off your electric bill each megawatt-hour saved earns one certificate. Then you can sell the certificates in emerging carbon trading markets. IBM's own consolidation project (collapsing 3,900 distributed servers onto 30 mainframes) will net certificates worth between $300K and $1M, depending on carbon's market price. Will ubiquitous carbon trading discourage energy-inefficient, distributed-style infrastructure in favor of highly virtualized and I/O-savvy environments, particularly mainframes?"

16 of 316 comments (clear)

  1. Full Circle? by Aereus · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I do find it ironic that computing started out with large mainframes, and now it seems more and more likely that the majority of computing needs in the future will be met by terminals connected to mainframes via virtualization.

    1. Re:Full Circle? by BadAnalogyGuy · · Score: 2, Interesting

      You have obviously never watched any science fiction movies, television shows, or LARP sessions. You must have also missed the entire genre of sci-fi fiction that always assumed that the future would be in the form of gigantic databases which controlled every aspect of life.

      I think Vonnegut said it best, "I have been a soreheaded occupant of a file drawer labeled "Science Fiction" ... and I would like out, particularly since so many serious critics regularly mistake the drawer for a urinal."

    2. Re:Full Circle? by Antiocheian · · Score: 2, Interesting

      If you judge "power" by an arithmetic test of the CPU and by memory size, probably.

      But even the old mainframes were build to sustain stress in multiuser environments where your cellphone and even your modern PC would collapse.

  2. Carbon credits = lame by Z80xxc! · · Score: 5, Interesting

    The whole concept of "carbon neutral" and off-setting your carbon emissions for whatever reason seams kind of lame to me. Instead of continuing to do things that cause global warming while doing other things to supposedly reduce your "carbon footprint", why not just try to eliminate or reduce the problems in the first place? It's not just individuals, it's the whole mindset of society. Instead of going for carbon-neutral server farms, why not develop cleaner alternative electricity options to power those server farms? Solar power could do a lot, but we'd rather earn carbon certificates. It just doesn't make sense.

    1. Re:Carbon credits = lame by IamTheRealMike · · Score: 4, Interesting

      the IS NO COST to emitting carbon that anyone can quantify as yet

      Sure there is. Just make an organization liable for the costs of climate-change related damage relative to the amount of CO2 it directly emits. You already have to buy carbon credits if you emit CO2 so we have a registry of who emits and how much. This way, the cost is amortized over the whole economy, increasing our ability to manage it (via general price increases).

      For instance, let's say that mosquitos start moving up into Europe and spreading various nasty diseases. The health insurance claims for these events can be claimed back from the economy as a whole by suing the CO2 emitters in a class action suit. The details of whether a particular problem was caused or the risk increased by climate change can be thrashed out by the courts. I sense some scepticism in your remarks over whether climate change is real - that's OK, you can believe what you want, but I suspect when put in a court any such defence would have a hard time in the face of a nearly unlimited supply of expert witnesses. The CO2 emitters would be forced to try and calculate the risk to the environment from what they do based on what they believe and the advice their experts give them, and would then pass that on to their customers, thus the "true cost" of climate change would ripple through the economy.

      This has benefit over the rather artificial carbon credits market, in that the "cost" of emitting a ton of CO2 is - as you rightly point out - basically pulled out of somebodies arse right now. What's more, they were deliberately set low enough to not have any impact on existing businesses, so instead of bringing about real change they just brought extra democracy. The idea of using markets to take action is the right one, but the "risk premium" needs to be priced into everyday goods.

      I just made this scheme up off the top of my head. There are several key objections I can anticipate. The first is that climate change seems likely to kill a lot of people via disease/drought/etc, if indeed it's not doing so already, and how can you price a human life? Well, it is possible, but only in various untasteful ways. I don't think this one is solvable, nor should it detract from the scheme - the market is a tool and we need it to serve us now, to reach our end goals.

      The second is that it would be inflationary if enacted globally, at once, because it would lead to a round of general price increases which would then in turn cause more borrowing by those without the spare cashflow to absorb it (ie, most people these days), thus inflating the money supply. This is especially true of essentials like oil (let's ignore peak oil for now). Inflation in the presence of a general price increase is not inevitable assuming you define inflation as an increase in the size of the money supply - that's an artifact of the fractional reserve. Replacing the fractional reserve with something less prone to inflation is certainly a good idea. But, if you suppress inflation (eg, by going to a Robertson/Huber type money supply), a general price increase makes us all poorer. That's more or less inevitable though - we would simply be paying what other people less able to pay (because they just lost their food supply/health/whatever) would be paying anyway, but everyone pays a small amount now instead of watching and saying "I hope that never happens to me". It's not a different concept to insurance in fact, but it's not optional, because climate change affects everyone.

      The third is that it requires everybody to act more or less in concert. Unfortunately the "race to the bottom" is a general problem with regulating business and should not discourage us from working together to do so.

      There are probably more problems with this scheme, but it does have the advantage that carbon emission is priced "naturally" and integrated into the sticker price of things like a unit of electricity - if you can get yourself out of the CO2 emitters game by replacing your electricity usage with solar or wind (or even nuclear!) then you are no longer liable for potentially huge disaster-relief costs, thus you can lower your prices, gaining an advantage over your competitors.

    2. Re:Carbon credits = lame by Alchemist253 · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Part of the problem is that we see a perpetuation of the myth that everyone's opinion is equally valid on this issue (or any issue, for that matter).

      There is of course the old phrase, "you are entitled to your own opinion, not to your own facts." But let's suppose that everyone agrees on the basic facts. The facts in question are not things like global average surface temperature; the global warming opponents are correct that we do not have actual temperature data for most of the planet's history. Instead, the facts are more obscure: oxygen isotope ratios, nitrogen exchange rates, geological strata, etc.

      Valid interpretation of these data (and their significance vis a vis human involvement) is HARD! I am an organic chemist by training, which probably makes me better suited to analyze the facts than most, but even I readily admit that I have difficulty deciphering the maze of evidence out there. Fortunately, there are others (climatologists) who have spent decades or longer learning all there is to know about climate science, and scrutinizing the data. The OVERWHELMING CONSENSUS among PhD-level climatologists (and I know a few personally) is the global warming is REAL, and is HUMAN CAUSED.

      Now, the problem arises when politicians, businessmen, and even scientists stepping outside their discipline start second-guessing the climatologists' work. I submit that unless you have equivalent training, education, and experience as those with whom you disagree on a fundamentally scientific issue, your opinion COUNTS LESS. I completely ignore the ramblings of the people talking about sunspots, et cetera, because I trust that the majority of climate scientists knows what it is doing. My only alternative is to go for a PhD in that field, and start slowly bringing myself to the majority's level.

      It strikes me as interesting that most people (not necessarily most on Slashdot, though) tend to willingly accept the pronouncements of auto mechanics, physicians, and electricians, for example, all of whom are similarly professionals but working in fields much more comprehensible and accessible than climate science. But when it comes to global warming, suddenly everyone and their brother know more than the professors.

    3. Re:Carbon credits = lame by IamTheRealMike · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Sure, of course it's not possible to get this exactly right, but you don't need to. You only need to make the products of companies that emit carbon more expensive. Trying to figure out how much more expensive is what this is all about - the current "state of the art" is carbon credits, the prices of which are set by politicians in response to lobbying. Having them set by the courts is only a minor improvement, but it is still an improvement. You can take into account 'increased risk' with some fancy formulas if you like, or you can say something like "you have a 1 in N chance of having to pay for this disaster" - the effect in terms of raising prices would be the same.

    4. Re:Carbon credits = lame by Aczlan · · Score: 2, Interesting

      When it comes to environment: California != USA. California has stricter environmental laws than almost anyone, that is not the standard in the US. at least not to my knowledge.
      California standards are defacto standards for the rest of the US as carmakers make all their cars to meet California standards, that way they dont have to have a "California edition" and a "rest of the US edition"...
      --
      "Democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for lunch. Liberty is a well-armed lamb contesting the vote
    5. Re:Carbon credits = lame by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Interesting

      I'm European (a Finn to be exact) and I feel simply ashamed for the idiocy in the GP post. Kudos for your patience in explaining.

      Over here we do get a funny image of USA quite often -- something of a combo of Hollywood/TV unrealism and Michael Moore negativism I suppose -- which is of course the fault of the media providers we subscribe to, so ultimately (but not totally directly) it's the fault of each of our own. (In Finland I've gradually come to think that the best TV channels, the ones still having some kind of standards for content quality and news integrity, are the both state owned ones... Soviet Finland huh?)

      I'm so glad I had a chance to spend a few weeks in USA in early '90s, opened my eyes early on to a literally great country -- more a continent full of wildly different states than a "country" -- and some of the nicest and most thoughtful people I've met in my life.

      I love Finland, but I deeply like a quite a few States over there and feel okay about bashing Bush all the time :-P

      Cheers, Tom

  3. carbon trading set to burn many by timmarhy · · Score: 2, Interesting
    So, in 50 years when the earth HASN'T turned into a bad hollywood movie and everyone wakes up to the fact global warming is a scam, get we get a refund on these bogus credits?

    this whole carbon trading thing reeks of profiteering to me.

    --
    If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
    1. Re:carbon trading set to burn many by Spad · · Score: 2, Interesting

      It's a great idea really. You're a big polluting corporation, so you set up a couple of very low emission subsidury companies that earn "carbon credits" for their low carbon footprint. You then "buy" these credits off them to allow you to pollute as much as you want.

      See, the environment is saved.

  4. Mod Parent Up by giafly · · Score: 2, Interesting

    So, in 50 years when the earth HASN'T turned into a bad hollywood movie and everyone wakes up to the fact global warming is a scam, get we get a refund on these bogus credits? this whole carbon trading thing reeks of profiteering to me.
    That's exactly right. The speed of global warming is grossly exaggerated and most so-called ways of fighting it are scams. In 50 years earth won't yet have turned into a disaster movie. The problem is that there's so much inertia in this process that in 50 years the disaster will be too late to stop.
    --
    Reduce, reuse, cycle
  5. Re:carbon credit nonsense by Hal_Porter · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Here's a thought, focus on the worst pollution areas of the world like China and reduce air travel by half - why do people fly so much if it's such a hassle to fly, especially to/from/within the USA? Why? A 747 gets 100 miles per gallon per passenger.

    http://www.howstuffworks.com/question192.htm

    This sounds like a tremendously poor miles-per-gallon rating! But consider that a 747 can carry as many as 568 people. Let's call it 500 people to take into account the fact that not all seats on most flights are occupied. A 747 is transporting 500 people 1 mile using 5 gallons of fuel. That means the plane is burning 0.01 gallons per person per mile. In other words, the plane is getting 100 miles per gallon per person! The typical car gets about 25 miles per gallon, so the 747 is much better than a car carrying one person, and compares favorably even if there are four people in the car. Not bad when you consider that the 747 is flying at 550 miles per hour (900 km/h)! Better than one person in Prius.

    http://www.toyota.com/prius/

    The Prius boasts an EPA-estimated combined city/highway rating of 46 miles per gallon Two or more in people in Prius will beat a 747. Or maybe not, loading up a car will cause the total miles per gallon to drop as the weight increases. Maybe you need three people in a Prius to be safe. But most cars have one person and lower mpg, so it's not like 747s are worse on average than cars.

    You don't need to Google all this stuff yourself of course, you just pick the cheapest way to travel and rely on market forces to make the most energy efficient way the cheapest. Which should be true so long as oil is expensive enough to make it a non neglibable part of total costs.
    --
    echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
  6. x86 inefficent? by happymellon · · Score: 2, Interesting

    IBM promoting a proprietary technology? Wouldn't you get the same type of saving on moving to Power or Sparc instead of x86 since they are also hugely more energy efficent? You also have to remember that it depends on what your processing, mainframe will only provide you with a speed boost with certain types of basic arithmetic (quite a big speed boost in some cases). So take these increases with a pinch of salt. On second thoughts perhaps I'm just bitter from increasing capacity the capacity of our mainframes to run more processes, and finding all our existing licenses cost more because they all charge you on potential capacity of the system rather than number of copies even if you not using the extra capacity for the existing apps.

  7. Re:Carbon credits = SCAM by Bert64 · · Score: 2, Interesting

    The abundant housing is usually around the edges of a city, whereas businesses usually set themselves up in the centre where all the other businesses are...
    So you end up with large numbers of people having to travel from the edges to the centre every day, over crowding the transport systems. There is usually not an abundance of affordable housing within walking distance of where all the businesses are running.
    What we need is a larger number of smaller towns, where people can live and work within walking or biking distance. Or, just change the layout of larger cities, knock down 2/3 of the office buildings in the center and build apartments for people working at the remaining 1/3 to live in.

    I want to live within walking distance of where i work, not so much for the environment but for my own benefit. I value my time, and wasting several hours of it a day travelling is a complete waste.

    --
    http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
  8. Let's EAT our way out of the problem! by flatulus · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Page 227 of "An Inconvenient Truth":

    Much of the forest destruction comes from burning. Almost 30% of the CO2 released into the atmosphere each year is a result of the burning of brushland for subsistence agriculture and wood fires used for cooking.

    Page 217 of "An Inconvenient Truth:"

    (a graph showing) 2006 global population: 6.5 billion. 2050 global population: 9.1 billion.

    I find it interesting that Gore trumpets the so-called "tipping point" positive feedback theory about the Arctic ice cap melting, leading to more solar absorption, leading to faster melting, while...

    Each tree cut down to make space for subsistence agriculture and wood fires not only releases the carbon in the tree, but also removes the tree from the ecosystem, so it isn't there to absorb the just-released carbon (or any other, which it had been faithfully doing since it was a wee little sapling).

    Greg Gutfeld had an interesting (and irreverent, which is his specialty) comment on Fox News website. He said we have two problems -- global warming, and overpopulation. He suggested we change our moral value system to encourage cannibalism. Bada bing -- two birds with one stone.

    I guess my main point here is that one can justify any position desired, by simply sifting through the "facts" and arranging them according to one's personal agenda. Al Gore now has a nice Nobel prize to show to his grandchildren (who will never, ever need to burn trees for cooking), and the bandwagon is in full motion. I read yesterday that Dell would like to know if I wanted to pay a couple of dollars with the purchase of my laptop to offset the carbon my new toy (er, tool) would release by burning electricity.

    A tax by any other name is a tax. Thankfully death will ultimately relieve me of that burden too. (Joe Black notwithstanding).