ivy’s page

One of my colleagues pushed the initiative of organizing a barcamp on the future of the web. A barcamp is kind of a ad-hoc conference, similar to bird-of-a-feather sessions or an unconference. It’s a place where people can present about whatever they want, with the attendees taking care of the organization and choosing to attend the sessions they like. The recipe for organizing your own barcamp seems to be open source as well, see barcamp.org if you consider doing something like it…

Anyway, the barcamp inspired me to tell a bit about green computing; a field in which I’m not necessarily an expert (nor a model practitioner), but at the time I heard about this event it had just drawn my attention. An article and a book I’d just read inspired me to pick my subject. First I’d just finished an article (Dutch, but there must be many similar English ones around) about the exponentially growing energy consumption of the web. If this trend continues, the future of the web is that it will take up all the energy we can still get our hands on. Next to that I’d finished Collapse, in which Jared Diamond describes how “eating up all the available resources and than collapsing” is quite a common pattern for societies. It sounds kind of sad, but in the end he writes; if you worry about this pattern in your own society, the best/real/only remedy is to ask yourself the question: “What can I as an individual do about this?”. Given the intended IT-minded audience my presentation revolved around the theme: “what can we as Software people do about the growing energy consumption of the web/computing?”.

Green computing is the study and practice of efficient and eco-friendly computing resources, and it tries to answer a similar question (yet in a broader fashion). There are more environmental issues to deal with besides energy consumption, and there are many non-computing solutions for saving your environment, but I tried to keep my story focused and practical.

The good thing about green computing is that for many companies it isn’t necessarily an environment thing (sometimes that’s only bonus), but it saves big money and it makes you look good if you take social responsibility.

Here’s my very shortlist of what you can do:

• Consider buying green hardware
• Use power management options on your computers
• Develop (where applicable) solutions for virtualized hardware or the cloud

Green hardware will become easier to buy (laptops are less power consuming, so that’s a good trend, power management is turned on by default these days, and the cloud is something you can’t miss these days.

There’s lots of info on the web on each of these subjects, or see my slides for those that are interested.

This entry was posted on Friday, November 7th, 2008 at 9:46 pm and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.