Everyone knows that computers consume a lot of electricity, and while they've become more efficient in the last 20 years, there are also a lot more of them, and they're used more constantly. Timothy Prickett Morgan has an extremely interesting article making the case for "Lean, Mean Green Machines"-- computers that are designed from the ground up to be as energy efficient as possible.
Some of the efficiency gains would come by making the machines simply use less power to do the same work, and Morgan goes into deep detail about more efficient processors, power management, thin clients, clock multipliers, and all kinds of other things.
But other gains could come from using computers differently. As Morgan puts it, "grid and virtualization are green," because they help computers be used more effectively:
Every PC sold today should come with vendor-authorized grid software installed and allowing end users to pick the research organizations and charities to which they can donate their excess computing power for free; alternatively, vendors should be compelled to set up an open CPU cycle exchange that would allow end users to sell their excess capacity on an open market. If most PCs and servers are running full-out and do not have sophisticated power management features, something useful should be done with all that excess capacity.
Imagine if rich Western nations could sell their excess computing capacity to developing nations at a fraction of the cost of actually having these nations invest in their own IT infrastructure to do sophisticated number crunching. Provided that countries did not engage in the development of weapons, giving this computing capacity away or charging a modest fee for it would be the decent thing to do. This approach would probably not make IT vendors happy, since they are relying on developing economies for revenue and profit growth, and almost by definition their unhappiness with such an idea would only serve to prove what a good one it is.
The software and standards exist for such a universal grid connection for PCs and servers. Someone just has to see that it is necessary and then set about to getting it done.
This struck me because it resonates with something I've been looking at in other projects. One interesting thing that's happened with pervasive computing technologies-- or the leading edge of them that we've been living with for the last couple years-- is that they've been used to turn private property or goods into publicly-accessible, shared goods. This is most clearly the case with information: a digital archive allows people to view unique documents or artifacts (or images of artifacts, at least) that previously could only be seen in museums or libraries. Since it's a non-rival good, information can be shared widely, with no loss to the original owner. We're also starting to see some interesting experiments involving the sharing of physical goods:
Mediachest, for example, lets you create online inventories of things you'd be interested in loaning to others, like CDs, DVDs, or power tools (most of which are dramatically underused, given how rugged they are).
What Morgan is proposing is a slightly different system-- the processor cycles are currently being wasted, rather than sitting unused-- but the underlying idea is the same: creating a system that lets you take something privately-owned (or in this case, privately generated but under-used) and either donate it (turning it into a public good, as already happens with Seti@Home, Folding@Home, etc.) or resell it.
[via Roland Piquepaille]
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