Slashdot Mirror
Internet's Energy Needs Growing Faster Than Efficiency Gains
Electrons may not weigh anything, but it takes some heavy lifting, both literal and figurative, to point them in the right direction. Reader terrancem writes with this excerpt: "Energy efficiency gains are failing to keep pace with the Internet's rapid rate of expansion, says a new paper published in the journal Science. Noting that the world's data centers already consume 270 terawatt hours and Internet traffic volume is doubling every three years, Diego Reforgiato Recupero of the University of Catania argues for prioritizing energy efficiency in the design of devices, networks, data centers, and software development. Recupero highlights two approaches for improving efficiency: smart standby and dynamic frequency scaling or CPU throttling."
You lost me there.
270 terawatt hours! Is that per hour I wonder ?
What about the energy offset?
How much energy is consumed by driving to blockbuster, picking up a physical tape that had to be produced and shipped to the store Vs. streaming from Netflix?
How about paying bills online vs mailing an envelope.
I'm not sure what the number is but it may be possible that for every increase in energy 'x' by computers there was '5x' amount of energy saved in other areas???
In how long?
Could be 30 gigawatts for a year, 300 megawatts for a decade, 370 gigawatts for a month or even 16.2 petawatts in a minute.
Units matter!
and plant some trees? then it evens out
Did anyone notice the meaning in Italian of the paper author's last name is "re-forged recycling"?
Your post advocates a
( ) technical (X) legislative ( ) market-based ( ) vigilante ( ) form-based
approach to fighting spam. Your idea will not work ...
Yada yada yada ...
(X) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the money^W^Whis head
Yada yada ...
(X) Lack of centrally controlling authority for email
(X) Open relays in foreign countries
(X) Asshats
(X) Jurisdictional problems
(X) Armies of worm riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes
(X) Extreme profitability of spam
(X) Technically illiterate politicians
(X) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with spammers
(X) Dishonesty on the part of spammers themselves
(X) Bandwidth costs that are unaffected by client filtering
Yada Yada
(X) I don't want the government reading my email
(X) Killing them that way is not slow and painful enough
Furthermore, this is what I think about you:
(X) Sorry dude, but I don't think it would work.
(X) This is a stupid idea, and you're a stupid person for suggesting it.
( ) Nice try, assh0le! I'm going to find out where you live and burn your house down
Actually, the mass of an electron is: 9.10938291(40)×10^31 kg :-)
I think you might have missed a minus sign there. Unless the Sun is an electron.
Damn. I want to know what universe you live, in, those electrons are HEAVY.
The sun only weighs ~1.9891x10^30kg, an electron is almost 5.0 x 10^1000 times heavier!
( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sun )
Self proclaimed typo king, and inventor of the bear destroying coffee table (patent not pending).
Government monitoring and storage of all communications of its citizenry has got to have a tremendous carbon footprint. As does all the extra electricity used by Facebook, Google, Double Click et all to track my every move on the internet. How much energy could be saved by simply serving web requests, and not data mining it for government and corporate interests?
Every sentence in your post should be wrapped in "citation needed". What constitutes "The Internet" in this discussion? By what metric is it inefficient? What is the basis for your claim that there was no consideration about the actual power requirements? What do you mean by "energy efficient in a purist sense"?
By not having to mail letters, package software in retail packaging and ship to a store or end user, travel to other office locations for meetings, and other spendy endeavors?
Overall the Internet is a huge energy saver.
If your software doesn't have to work or provide utility to human society then you can make it take zero resources and run in zero time. Now it turns out that Java is *very* fast. It turns out that Java's abstractions are up to the developer. N00bs, and those on the lecture circuit, add way to much abstractions. I add the right amount. *one layer of indirection for parts that may be extended*. That is all that is needed.
Furthermore, through use of Java and XML you can rapidly built systems through massive re-use (and nifty stuff like JAXB which takes much of the pain of using XML away). This allows equally massive *savings* in energy through vastly reduced development time.
You know, something that has been solved long ago in the form of LISP code-generating macros. Sigh.
LISP is a nice language. Good luck getting everyone to use it. Other languages were invented for a reason, they were easier for teams of non-fanbois to be productive and get real shit done. Deal with it (please).
So, nice try at grinding your pro-LISP axe. But a bit of a fail considering the holistic situation (both in terms of energy use and software development reality).
it'll reduce CPU processing requirements by a relatively small amount. One place I worked, we had a XML protocol for storing our data, replacing it with a binary one increased performance by 20%. Now that's not to be sniffed at, but it isn't a panacea.
What we can do however, is get rid of the script language based web sites. I know there's a low entry barrier when using them, but every site that needs performance ends up writing it in a compiled language, and then C/C++ if they've got sense (Java, and .NET are better, but still not good enough for this problem).
Now if we had all server computing based on an efficient language, we'd see energy consumption reduced by quite a bit.The super computers we have nowadays could run a great many sites instead of just a handful. And yes, they'd also use a binary protocol by default instead of the XML based stuff almost every "easy to use" system and framework uses.
Of course using a computer as an electric heater is less efficient than a dedicated electric powered exchange pump which can have effective efficiencies many times 100%
I just finished writing an article on 16 ways to save the planet. Number 8 was to institute a efficiency standards. Design a moving goal post to keep pressing the issue in a sort of energy efficiency Mores Law. Currently our brains are a million times more efficient than the computers we run and at the same time are a million times more powerful! If we press the issue and put money into it we can build the technology to get our computers to match the efficiency of the human brain. There already has been several designs proposed to make this happen including using old analog types of computer designs instead of digital ones which are far more efficient for some things. Also designing chips to come up with correct answers using the chaos and noise rather than by overriding the noise by pushing high voltage differences between 1's and 0's.
But perhaps a more sensible measurement is just to use the actual generating capacity required. 270 terawatt hours per year would be about 31 gigawatts. Consider that HydroQuebec alone produces more power than that from renewable sources, and suddenly it doesn't seem so big anymore.
It has grown, but it's never been looked at as a whole in terms of hardware.
Why should it ever be someone's job to do that, at least with respect to energy efficiency? I can see the boon to human knowledge to have people study the extent and impact of the internet.
But there's no genuine energy efficiency problem here. If there was, then everyone would be working harder on reducing energy consumption than on expanding their infrastructure. As it turns out, energy is dirt cheap, while the value from the internet is considerable. So I think the right balance is struck here with little to no interest in energy efficiency because there's little to no value to doing so.
If you allow someone to pollute without charging them for it and the EPA, health insurance etc picks up the cost that is a subsidy to that industry.
No, it's an externality, a cost imposed on a third party. Which is why it's called that. A subsidy is a payment or transfer of something of value usually to assist in a given activity.
If the EPA deliberately paid for the harm caused by a business's pollution so that the business wouldn't have to pay for the externality itself (something the EPA doesn't do, BTW), then that could be a subsidy which also happens to be an externality.
I have read a fair number of reports on natural gas fracking sites
There's a lot of environmentalism oriented propaganda out there. I'm sure there is some truth to the claims of pollution and regulatory misconduct in there somewhere, but we need to keep in mind that fracking as well as any other major fossil fuel-based innovation is a huge threat to those who wish to end the use of fossil fuels (or even industrial society itself). And a lot of those people are willing to lie outrageously to get what they want.
My view is that oil drilling has gone on for a long time. Even fracking as a technique has been used for decades. If there was a serious pollution problem with this stuff we would have seen it long ago with major air and water quality problems nowhere near an oil well.