June 2008 Archives

Rackspace finds that customers are losing interest in pursuing green technologies. But are there other factors, like an economy in a tailspin, at play?

63% won't sacrifice server performance to lower carbon emissions - NetworkWorld

Hosting provider Rackspace surveyed 3,000 customers this year and last year, and found some results suggesting businesses are losing interest in green technology.

Sixty-three percent of customers this year said they are not willing to sacrifice any server performance to lower carbon emissions. (Compare server products.) Last year, only 41% of Rackspace customers were unwilling to sacrifice performance to reduce global warming emissions.

Green Storage and The Idle Time Secret - Nexan - The Green Storage Blog

Recently, Steve Lohr of the New York Times wrote an interesting article titled, “Demand for Data Puts Engineers in Spotlight” . A paragraph of particular interest states, “The problem is that most computers in data centers run at 15 percent or less of capacity on average, loafing the rest of the time, though consuming electricity all the while. (In the old days, when they housed a few large computers, data centers were far more efficient. Mainframe computers run at 80 percent of capacity or more).”

Grant turning city onto solar power - NOLA.com

As Louisianians face unprecedented state and federal tax credits offering up to $12,500 off the cost of solar panel systems, solar technology has yet to become a significant trend. A barely-there solar business infrastructure (there are currently five certified solar installers in the entire state, said Forest Bradley-Wright with the Alliance), a lack of public information about the technology and the financial hump of buying a solar system, even with the tax credits, are the main obstacles the grant will tackle through programs such as the solar installation course, McGowan said.

G-8 to Pledge $10 Billion to Combat Climate Change, Nikkei Says - Bloomberg

Leaders from the Group of Eight nations will pledge to spend more than $10 billion a year on research and development to tackle climate change, Nikkei English News said.

The Environmental Technology of Wall*E - EcoGeek

In Wall*E's world we seem to have developed some great environmental technologies. Wind turbines abound...though they are covered up to their necks in the refuse of our civilization. This, for me, was the movie's most powerful statement. Is it possible that, no matter how much power we produce renewably, we will never satisfy the demand of the Earth's people. Will we simply consume our way back into the hole of unsustainability no matter what solutions are presented by technology?

Sony Ericsson Named Greenest Electronics Manufacturer - Matter Network

Sony Ericsson wins the title of most improved, environmentally speaking. In the eighth issue of Greenpeace’s Greener Electronics Guide, Sony Ericsson took the lead as the producer of green electronics.

It looks like 4-day workweeks are catching on. In Utah, Governor Jon M Huntsman, Jr. is kicking off the Working 4 Utah initiative in August. State government agencies will operate on extended hours Monday through Thursday, 7 am to 6 pm, and close Fridays. Essential services, courts and the like remain unaffected.

The plan is already winning raves from the Salt Lake Tribune. However, they rightfully point out that 10-hour workdays may upset 5-day routines.

West Valley City and Provo, have adopted four-day schedules and they report that most employees like it, although a 10-hour workday takes some getting used to. A Brigham Young University study suggests that both morale and productivity improve.

Still, the schedule will be a challenge for employees with children. Day care from 6:30 a.m. to 6:30 p.m. is going to be hard to find, and no parent would relish getting kids ready for elementary school by 6:30 a.m., then figuring out how the children will be supervised until school starts at 8:30 a.m. And how are parents supposed to help with after-school activities when they don't get off work until 6 p.m.?

Nonetheless, the energy savings and lowered emissions, for both the State and its workers, are hard to ignore. Plus one more solid, uninterrupted day of family/personal time? I suspect many will gladly make the trade-off.

Greenpeace is at it again. It's unlikely, however, that it will prevent Apple devotees from lining up on launch day.

3G iPhone ruins Apple's green credentials - PC Advisor

Apple has missed a “big chance” to advance green credentials by “not improving the environmental performance of the new version of the iPhone”, says eco campaign force Greenpeace.

CherryPal: The Green Little PC That Could - EcoGeek

Even the name is adorable. CherryPal. This tiny 10.5 oz PC is coming soon, and will use no more than 2 watts of power without sacrificing speed. The triple-core processor uses only 20% of the components of traditional computers and will start up in only 20 seconds, promising to be faster than Vista and mac’s OS-X…though it doesn’t take much to be faster than Vista.

Do sustainable PCs exist? - TG Daily

Dell currently has two green computing options on the market - the Dell Latitude D630 Energy Smart Laptop and the Optiplex 755 Energy Smart Desktop.

What makes the Optiplex 755 special is the fact that Dell claims the Core 2 Duo-based PC offers energy efficient power management settings. The systems is said to consume 54% less power than computers that don’t allow you to configure your power management settings. Dell promises that the 80% efficient power supply are between 10-12% more efficient than power supplies of the past. Dell declines to share any actual energy use numbers on their website.

Kill the Business Trip - Forbes

Here's my favorite set of "clean-tech" companies--the folks who make online meetings and conferences possible, and let travelers skip all the hassle and environmental problems of travel. Even better: It's an area ripe with inefficiencies and so primed for innovation.

So far two companies have done particularly well in the stock market by offering Web-based conferencing technology: Polycom and Webex.

Disk Drives Costing More Green - Data Center Central, IT Business Edge

Enterprises looking to cut down on power and cooling costs might want to shift their eyes from the server rack to the storage array.

The latest figures from IDC indicate worldwide expenditures to cool magnetic storage is set to nearly double by the end of this year. In 2007, enterprises shelled out about $1 billion on storage-related cooling, a figure that seems likely to top $1.8 billion this year.

It took a long time but there you have it.

Microsoft is finally officially releasing Hyper-V today after its beta was put through its paces by 1.5 million downloaders. The company's hypervisor will be baked into some versions of Windows Server but you can download the RTM (release-to-manufacturing) at around noon Pacific.

Server 2008 Hyper-V can handle VMs with "up to four virtual cores, 32-bit as well as 64-bit operating systems, and up to 64 GB of RAM." And to prove that their stab at virtualization is more than a neat toy for geeks, Microsoft is undergoing some server consolidation of its own and running some beefy workloads on it.

Meanwhile, Microsoft itself has been using Hyper-V in production environments, including heavy-traffic Web properties such as MSDN, TechNet and Microsoft.com. MSDN has more than 3 million average page views per day, TechNet averages more than 1 million per day, and Microsoft.com averages more than 38 million per day. By the end of June, Microsoft.com is targeted to be 50 percent virtualized with Hyper-V.

If you're of the sort that's starting to feel the way the winds are blowing, here's Microsoft's TechNet page devoted to Hyper-V.

John Howard, Senior Program Manager, Hyper-V team, Windows Core Operating System Division, has a good post on his blog explaining some specification, changes since RC1 and recommended updates.

For example, here are Hyper-V's uppermost limits (parent partition):

• Up to 1 TB of physical memory (Enterprise and Datacenter Editions)
• Up to 32GB of physical memory (Standard Edition)
• Up to 16 logical processors
• Up to 128 virtual machines running at any one time
• Up to 512 virtual machines configured

Be sure to get caught up on some of those knowledge base articles before venturing forth. And don't miss this earlier post on virtual network use cases. Things just got a little more interesting, haven't they?

Should VMware be trembling in their boots?

Maybe just a little. But for now, they are comfortably perched at the very top of the virtualization market. More importantly, the brand has become synonymous with virtualization. And though Hyper-V supports virtualized instances of other operating systems, non-Windows shops will likely be hesitant to make the leap.

In any case, welcome Hyper-V!

This summer, New York City will reward visitors and residents with a little bit of engineered natural beauty this summer. Hailed as the biggest art installation in New York City since Christo and Jeanne-Claude's The Gates (also awesome), The New York City Waterfalls by Olafur Eliasson will bring man-made waterfalls to four locations. The most dramatic one is nestled under the Brooklyn Bridge.

The New York Times has a spectacular gallery of an predawn test. The waterfalls will operate starting tomorrow, June 26 until October 13, 7am to 10pm. If you're in town, be sure to stop by and gawk.

[via Gizmodo]

Those nosebleed oil prices are putting a strain on businesses (and individuals too). As a result, a curious, though not unexpected trend is emerging says this ABC News report. Manufacturing jobs are starting to trickle back into the U.S. prompting some to toss around the notion of reverse globalization.

As the cost of shipping continues to soar along with fuel prices, homegrown manufacturing jobs are making a comeback after decades of decline. The cost of oil and shipping leads some companies to bring jobs back home.

While it once cost $3,000 to ship a container from a city like Shanghai to New York, it now costs $8,000, prompting some businesses to look closer to home for manufacturing needs.

Read the rest of the report and view the accompanying video here. And a note to the ABC News web folks... Shame on you for that one-sentence Page 2!

[via Slashdot]

It seems that to promote adequate power and cooling the last thing you want to do is to pack those servers in tight. But that's exactly what Rackable Systems is advocating.

Andy Patrizio of InternetNews reports on new gear from the company that allows data center operators to bunch more computing and storage capacity together without driving up power consumption.

The new designs deliver up to twice the density of existing Rackable Systems servers in the same physical footprint, while also reducing power consumption. Emphasis was placed on increasing local storage and compute density, rather than depending on attached storage or moving data around to process it.

Despite the increased density, Rackable specifically stressed power efficiencies as a major plus. "Our number one power claim is ecological," Geoff Noer, senior director of product marketing for Rackable told InternetNews.com. "It's leveraging everything we've learned and leveraging power efficiencies and a number of components across servers."

One of the standout new pieces of hardware is the Scale Out Blade ST2000 (pictured right).

In addition, there is the Scale Out Blade ST2000, a 9U rack and the highest-density rack the company has ever offered. It supports three power modules and 12 dual socket modules, for 21 cores per U and 11TB of storage per U.

21 cores, 11TB per U... not too shabby.

In just four short years, Cisco plans to cut its greenhouse gas emissions by 25 percent. John Chambers announced during Cisco Live! that the cuts will be made possible by across the board improvements, from internal operations and its own products to, of course, their own IT operations and how employees travel (or don't).

In a company press release, they outlined just how much of a reduction is in store.

In calendar year 2007, Cisco's gross GHG footprint was 832,000 metric tons of CO2 equivalents (CO2e). This footprint includes emissions from Cisco's globally owned and leased facilities, vehicles and its airline travel. Based upon the EPA Climate Leaders protocol, this figure becomes net 724,000 metric tons of CO2e. With today's announcement, Cisco aims to reduce its GHG emissions by 2012 to a net footprint of 543,000 metric tons of CO2e.

One way they plan to accomplish this is power management, which thanks to the likes of IBM and others, has sparked whole new ways of monitoring and tweaking data centers to make sure that no watt is wasted. Another is a favorite of mine: teleconferencing.

In its labs and data centers, which account for a significant percentage of Cisco's energy use, the company will deploy a variety of techniques. These include taking detailed measurements of energy flows, utilizing more efficient lab equipment, using the "virtual network" to store data, adding smart power-distribution units that automatically shut down machines not in use, and upgrading building mechanical and electrical systems. Cisco will also increase its use of collaboration technologies such as Cisco TelePresence and the Cisco WebEx suite of tools to reduce the need for business travel, which accounts for 27 percent of Cisco's GHG footprint.

For customers, Cisco launched the public beta of Efficiency Assurance Program (EAP) portal (link is on the right hand side), which is flush with Flash-based videos and tutorials to get companies started on their own CO2 reduction programs.

In related news, Cisco announced new software and services centered around virtualization. The new stuff, flying under the Cisco Data Center 3.0 banner, is as follows:

• Cisco Wide Area Application Services (WAAS) software release 4.1, offering virtualized application hosting services, greater application acceleration and video delivery for the branch office;
• Cisco Application Control Engine (ACE) software release 3.1 for the ACE 4710 application switch, offering up to 4 gigabits per second (Gbps) of throughput and up to 2 Gbps of compression capability, and multimedia readiness on a virtualized platform;
• Cisco VFrame Data Center software release 1.2, offering end-to-end infrastructure provisioning with Cisco ACE and VMware ESX;
• New Cisco Data Center 3.0 professional programs and services to better support customers with data center deployments.

Busy day. Thanks Dan!

Rising gas prices, which hits many squarely in the wallet, has many in our country turning their attention to fuel efficiency in cars. Brad Templeton of the EFF reminds that there are some other huge targets if you take into account the entirety of the U.S. energy budget.

He explains:

The rest of the energy budget is split 32% industrial (including making cars,) 18% commercial and 21% residential. But 70% of residential energy, 78% of commercial energy and 34% of industrial energy comes from electricity. (Just .3% of transportation energy does, but that will change if we move to electric cars.)

All these energy uses are quite diverse. There are many targets to attack, all worthy within their own scope but there’s only one truly big target, and that’s electricity generation. In the USA that’s currently 50% coal and 20% natural gas. So if you’re working to fix this — with renewable energy or nuclear — then you’re working on one of the big problems. Right now hydro and nuclear are the largest non-fossil power generators. All the other renewables are currently in the noise.

Catch more of his insightful Going Green posts here.

Thanks Alex!

But you'll still have to wait until 2010.

In the Seattle Times, Bob Lutz dashed hopes today for the $30,000 plug-in, gas-assisted electric car. He points out, however, that Congress may sweeten the deal by passing legislation for $7,000 in credits.

Lutz said the first-generation Volt will retail for about $40,000 and generate no profit for GM. The company hopes to make money as it rolls out later versions of the vehicle and other plug-in models.

Relately, The Atlantic has a great article on Volt's development. Granted pretty generous access, Jonathan Rauch chronicles some of the early days when there was a euphoric, yet still guarded, sense of purpose. Today, however, the realities of a 2010 launch as they squash technical gremlins are setting in.

Nanosolar has posted a neat video of their thin film solar printer, which they are billing as the "solar industry's first 1GW production tool." The $1.65 million CIGS coater hums along at 100 feet per minute in the video.

Catch an eyeful below.

[via Engadget, Earth2Tech]

IBM and the Los Alamos National Labs have landed at the very summit of the Top500 list with a score of 1.026 petaflop/s:

The new No. 1 system, built by IBM for the U.S. Department of Energy’s Los Alamos National Laboratory and named “Roadrunner,” by LANL after the state bird of New Mexico achieved performance of 1.026 petaflop/s—becoming the first supercomputer ever to reach this milestone. At the same time, Roadrunner is also one of the most energy efficient systems on the TOP500.

Roadrunner made waves a couple of weeks ago, and not just because it was the first to cross the petaflop milestone. Also helping to garner interest is its new, energy-efficient architecture that blends the blades powered by Cell processors (the technology behind the Playstation 3) and Opterons from AMD.

And just in time too, as the Top500 group is now also measuring power consumption. Roadrunner consumes 2345.50 KW, slightly more (in relative terms) than the DOE's second place BlueGene L, which consumes 2329.60 KW and has a performance rating of 478.2 teraflops--less than half of the first place winner.

Some more interesting observations on that front include...

• Most energy efficient supercomputers are based on:
  • IBM QS22 Cell processor blades up to 488 Mflop/s/Watt,
    
  • IBM BlueGene/P systems up to 371 Mflop/s/Watt

• Intel Harpertown quad-core blades are catching up fast:
  • IBM BladeCenter HS21with low-power processors (L5420) up to 265 Mflop/s/Watt
    
  • SGI Altix ICE 8200EX Xeon nodes (E5472) with high efficient Linpack up to 240 Mflop/s/Watt
    
  • Hewlett-Packard Cluster Platform 3000 BL2x220 with double density blades up to 227 Mflop/s/Watt

• These systems are already ahead of BlueGene/L (up to 210 Mflop/s/Watt).

The group also speculates that power consumption rises as rank drops because newer, more efficient technologies are usually found at the top end.

Another observation made by the group is that HP is starting to challenge IBM for the total number of systems on the list. Last time, HP had 166 sytems on the list versus IBM's 232. This time, the gap narrows with 183 spots for HP versus IBM's 210.

IBM, however, remains far and away the performance leader, accounting for "48 percent of installed total performance." HP comes second with 22.4 percent.

Other systems near the top include Argonne National Laboratory's Blue Gene/P at 450 teraflops (3rd place); University of Texas Advanced Computing Center's Sunblade-powered Ranger at 326 teraflops (4th place); and Oak Ridge National Laboratory's Cray XT4 Jaguar at 205 teraflops (5th place).

Congrats to all!

It's a question that has dogged eco-minded geeks forever. Is it better to turn off your PC while you're not using it or leave it on perpetually?

On one side of the coin, a PC that's shut off consumes no power. On the other side, too many on/off cycles means increased wear and tear. Patty Harshbarger at the Bradenton Herald went looking for a definitive answer and found this:

So what is the most energy-conscious routine for computer users? Certainly shutting a computer down, then powering up again within two or three hours would not be cost-effective, and might cause undue wear on the components. But if energy conservation is your main concern, Florida Power and Light recommends shutting down each night.

FPL reports that office equipment represents approximately 7 percent of home energy consumption. During use, Energy Star settings should be maximized, which can save approximately $20 per year for each computer/monitor system. Access these settings by right-clicking on your desktop, selecting Properties, then selecting the Screensaver tab, then "Power." Here you will find a series of pages on energy consumption. When making adjustments without tech support, take care that you understand the effects of your choices.

I've suffered no ill-effects shutting my PCs down at night. And I usually upgrade way before hardware failure becomes an issue, so I'm not too concerned. What's your strategy?

If you're with a large company, outfits like IBM, HP and Dell have got your green IT projects covered. But what about DIY small business types?

In "Green IT: Reduce Costs and Increase Customers" Polly Traylor spotlights a firm, Surf Technologies that was awash in paper. Not necessarily drowning in it, mind you, but just the act of storing it was costing the company in unforeseen ways.

She writes:

As an example, a Surf Technologies customer in the logistics industry had a love affair with paper: It maintained 600 filing cabinets of paper records for years, for no clear reason, according to Davignon. Through the help of his firm, the client plans to dispose of the records that are not needed, and scan the rest.

Going forward, the company will scan all records that need to be retained and place them on a storage area network. The firm could have determined years ago what the business truly needed to store from a legal and customer perspective – and for how long. Then, it could have created a document retention policy to dispose of paper records after a certain period of time, Davignon said.

She also lists some helpful tips that may present an unsettling shift at first but pay handsomely in the long run and will help boost your image as a company.

Green Plug, the smart, universal power supply that has found a solid new backer in Westinghouse.

Though the firm has been eclipsed by the likes of Sony and others in recent decades, the brand has made a bit of a comeback lately with its capable budget-friendly LCD TVs. Now the company is throwing its support behind Green Plug.

PC World tells us:

"We know we're not the largest [electronics company] but we are the first, and somebody has to be first," said Darwin Chang, CTO of Westinghouse, which makes LCD televisions, computer monitors and digital photo frames.

Besides helping the environment, the Green Plug technology will also help Westinghouse to cut its costs, Chang said. Eventually it could stop shipping power adapters with its products because customers will already have a universal adapter at home, he said.

For customers, salvation comes in the form of just one adapter for all their gadgets - goodbye unsightly wall warts. Plus there are energy savings to be had since the device goes all Buffy on power vampires via its own Green Talk protocol and chips that support it, which is why it's important to get other electronics makers on board if they hope to make it a standard.

Carbon negative Oil 2.0? Nice sounding, but can it be done?

Scientists at a Silicon Valley outfit called LS9 are growing bacteria that digest biological waste products like woodchips and convert it into a direct replacement for crude oil, with some genetic tinkering, of course.

This Times Online article explains:

Inside LS9’s cluttered laboratory – funded by $20 million of start-up capital from investors including Vinod Khosla, the Indian-American entrepreneur who co-founded Sun Micro-systems – Mr Pal explains that LS9’s bugs are single-cell organisms, each a fraction of a billionth the size of an ant. They start out as industrial yeast or nonpathogenic strains of E. coli, but LS9 modifies them by custom-de-signing their DNA. “Five to seven years ago, that process would have taken months and cost hundreds of thousands of dollars,” he says. “Now it can take weeks and cost maybe $20,000.”

And it doesn't seem we'll have to divert our food harvests to get the oil.

The company is not interested in using corn as feedstock, given the much-publicised problems created by using food crops for fuel, such as the tortilla inflation that recently caused food riots in Mexico City. Instead, different types of agricultural waste will be used according to whatever makes sense for the local climate and economy: wheat straw in California, for example, or woodchips in the South.

However, like many early stage companies, the biggest drawback is one of scale, or lack of it.

[via Slashdot]

Intel's not delaying the new gadget interconnect technology on purpose, honest!

In a mighty defensive blog post, Nick Knupffer is "dispelling the myths" that the chipmaking titan is holding back the specification. He writes:

No Intel isn’t holding back the specification, the whole point of Intel investing heavily (gazillions of dollars and bazillions of man hours) into creating this ‘Dummies Guide’ is to enable the industry to start building USB 3.0 into their silicon as soon as possible, so why would Intel purposefully delay? One danger however of distributing an unfinished spec is the risk of incompatible hardware down the line, leading to a right mess. As an Intel specification Intel has the responsibility to insure that specifications we deliver to the industry are fully developed and mature enough for others to use. The Intel host controller spec is expected to be unveiled to the industry as soon as possible, in the second half of the year. The impatience of our fellow chipset-makers (as described in the press) to leverage Intel’s investment and begin to design great USB 3.0 supporting devices of their own is however very encouraging and should aid a fast USB 3.0 adoption ramp.

Why do we care? Because "USB 3.0 promises a tenfold speed boost and low power consumption." That's why!

[via TG Daily]

Today IBM unveiled the latest products under its Project Big Green initiative, data center modules. It's a bit more complex than piecing together an IT facility out of Legos, but they still make a compelling case for taking a "grow as you need it" approach in these pricey, energy constrained times.

One revelation, the Portable Modular Data Center, is sure to have caused gasps among some observant industry watchers. It looks like IBM is taking on Sun's Blackbox in the teched-out shipping container market.

Fight!

That's roughly half the power consumed by employees working at home versus Sun's offices where each worker is responsible for 130 watts per hour.

Sun's Open Work Energy Measurement Project also found that...

• Employees saved more than $1,700 per year in gasoline and wear and tear on their vehicles by working at home an average of 2.5 days a week.

• Commuting was more than 98 percent of each employee's carbon footprint for work, compared to less than 1.7 percent of total carbon emissions to power office equipment.

• By eliminating commuting just 2.5 days per week, an employee reduces energy used for work by the equivalent of 5,400 Kilowatt hours/year.

And how would you like to get back the equivalent of 2.5 weeks worth of commuting time a year? Try working 2.5 days a week from home.

So there, more ammunition for your own flex-time and telework projects. Oh, and don't miss this 4-day workweek item from a couple of weeks ago.

[via Earth2Tech, Web Worker Daily]

Can you code green (or "green" code)? Microsoft seems to think so. InformationWeek's Nicholas Hoover reports on an interesting whitepaper issued by the company.

Microsoft compared power consumption between two installations on the same server with two dual-core processors and 4 GB of RAM, one running Windows Server 2003 R2 Enterprise x64 Edition with SP2 plus hot fixes, and the other running Windows Server 2008 Enterprise Edition, with a hard drive formatting in between.

The company found that Windows Server 2003 used as much as 10% more power despite only being able to deliver 80% of the maximum throughput as its successor. Microsoft attributes these improvements partially to power management features that Windows Server 2008 has enabled by default, like the automatic adjustment of processor performance based on workload.

If the same can be observed in the wild, then kudos to the Windows Server team. Hoover points out, though, that when you toss virtualization in the mix, things get somewhat murkier.

IBM sure enjoys dominating the Top500 rankings and their latest supercomputer for the US Department of Energy only gives them more reason to gloat. Roadrunner, costing $100 million and soon to be housed at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, operates at over one thousand trillion calculations per second, or at roughly 1.5 petaflops according to a video released by IBM (more below). According to IBM, it would take 100,000 of today's fastest laptops to match its performance.

Several interesting facts have emerged. First, Red Hat Linux provides its software foundation. And the name Roadrunner is a nod to New Mexico's state bird. But more importantly, IBM is billing it as the first hybrid supercomputer, utilizing both Cell processors and AMD Opterons. Interestingly enough, this design may very well end up making it one of the greenest supercomputers in existence.

Compared to most traditional supercomputer designs, Roadrunner's hybrid format sips power (3.9 megawatts) and delivers world-leading efficiency -- 376 million calculations per watt. IBM expects Roadrunner to place among the top energy-efficient systems later in June when the official "Green 500" list of supercomputers is issued.

As for other specs, IBM helpfully offers the following:

In total, Roadrunner connects 6,948 dual- core AMD Opteron chips (on IBM Model LS21 blade servers) as well as 12,960 Cell engines (on IBM Model QS22 blade servers). The Roadrunner system has 80 terabytes of memory, and is housed in 288 refrigerator-sized, IBM BladeCenter(R) racks occupying 6,000 square feet. Its 10,000 connections -- both Infiniband and Gigabit Ethernet -- require 57 miles of fiber optic cable. Roadrunner weighs 500,000 lbs. Companies that contributed components and technology include; Emcore, Flextronics, Mellanox and Voltaire.

Roadrunner's hybrid underpinnings are due to some clever engineering on Big Blue's part.

Two IBM QS22 blade servers and one IBM LS21 blade server are combined into a specialized "tri-blade" configuration for Roadrunner. The machine is composed of a total of 3,456 tri-blades built in IBM's Rochester, Minn. plant. Standard processing (e.g., file system I/O) is handled by the Opteron processors. Mathematically and CPU-intensive elements are directed to the Cell processors. Each tri-blade unit can run at 400 billion operations per second (400 Gigaflops).

You can catch an IBM-supplied YouTube video of the tech behind Roadrunner below.

Thanks Dan!

As cool as they are to look at, screensavers have outlived their usefulness. Worse, they consume power while your PC is otherwise idle.

Testra, Australia's giant telecom, got the memo and they've done away with those 1990's relics. Green Daily informs:

Is this going to do anything? Testra thinks so. By removing 36,000 screensavers, they claim to cut 646 tons of CO2, which would be like removing 140 cars from Australian roads for one full year.

Turns out the crazy colors or bouncing graphics take about as much power as regular processing. It also turns out that many of today's newfangled monitors don't really burn and don't need this protection. Most screensavers are just trippy distractions when your bored.

Having those flashy graphics zipping around takes as much processing power as you actually doing work, so why bother having your computer wasting all that energy just to have that green Matrix code running down your screen (which, by the way, doesn't make you look like Neo and was only slightly cool eight years ago).

I've long ago set my systems to just turn the screen off after X number of minutes. You should too. But no harshing on the Matrix!

What prompted Alain Robert to forgo the elevator and skitter up the side of the New York Times building today? World Environment Day 2008, that's what.

World Environment Day is the United Nations Environment Programme's way of drawing attention to global environmental issues.

World Environment Day, commemorated each year on 5 June, is one of the principal vehicles through which the United Nations stimulates worldwide awareness of the environment and enhances political attention and action.

The World Environment Day slogan for 2008 is Kick the Habit! Towards a Low Carbon Economy. Recognising that climate change is becoming the defining issue of our era, UNEP is asking countries, companies and communities to focus on greenhouse gas emissions and how to reduce them. The World Environment Day will highlight resources and initiatives that promote low carbon economies and life-styles, such as improved energy efficiency, alternative energy sources, forest conservation and eco-friendly consumption.

Now you (and I) know, be sure to mark your calendar for June 5 next year..

Earlier today, New Yorkers were treated to a bit of drama as serial building climber Alain Robert (aka the real-life Spiderman) climbed up the side of the New York Times building. He's since been arrested and the show's over, reports Gothamist.

But not so fast!

Now an unidentified copycat is taking a crack at it. The person's motives aren't clear at this point. Could be for World Environment Day as well, or this person may have thought it looked like fun.

Update: The New York Times' own blog has more details on the second climber.

The Craigslist of cleantech? Well, at least no one will accuse The Renewable Energy Business Network of aiming low.

New Renewable Network Hopes to Make Greentech Connections - Greentech Media

Rob Day, a principal at venture firm @Ventures and author of Greentech Media’s Cleantech Investing blog, said the network also has launched a Website that aims to be “the Craigslist of cleantech.”

Suntech: The Sun's the Limit - Seeking Alpha

While other solar companies have been fretting over their ability to procure polysilicon (a vital component of PV cells and modules), Suntech recently announced two huge developments; the acquisition of a stake in Shunda Holdings Co. Ltd, a manufacturer of solar wafers based in China, and the finalization of an agreement with one of Shunda's subsidiaries providing Suntech with a thirteen-year silicon wafer supply.

eSolar Scores 245MW Solar Deal in SoCal - Earth2Tech

eSolar, the solar startup backed by Google.org and Bill Gross’ Idealab, said today that it’s inked a deal to build a 245 MW solar thermal power plant in the Antelope Valley region of Southern California and sell that solar power to utility Southern California Edison. eSolar expects the plant to be fully operational by 2011.

Remake a Living: Are you the next green entrepreneur? - Gristmill

No, it's the entrepreneurs who get the publicity, the glamour, and (when it works) the money. That's probably why I hear from so many people who want to start businesses and nonprofits in sustainability consulting, carbon offsets, home energy audits, biofuels, wind power, organic food, and almost anything you can prefix with the word "green."

Shortage of Cleantech Workers - Venture Recruiter

TechWeb's Internet Revolution site has kicked off some green IT tutorials featuring GreenTech Media's Rick Thompson.

Topics so far include virtualization, Enterprise Sustainability Management (ESM) software, smart grids and efficient datacenter design. Structured as a video Q&A, fhe format is easy to follow. Click a question and Thompson takes a few moments to answer in concise manner. For in-depth information, the site points you to case studies and whitepapers.

In all, it's a nice place to send your colleagues if your business is taking the first steps to improve their IT operations.

Thanks Dan!

...power, that is.

A study conducted by Choice from Australia concludes that game consoles and plasma televisions top the list of home electronics when it comes to power consumption. Despite advances, modern day gadgets like PS3's, Xbox 360's and plasma sets dwarf other home electronics when it comes to the impact to your electric bill.

According to this Reuters report, they can also potentially out-consume some pretty big household appliances...

"Our tests found that leaving a Playstation 3 on while not in use would cost almost... five times more than it would take to run a refrigerator for the same yearly period," said the study which was published on Choice's website www.choice.com.au.

It's simple then, just turn them off when you're not playing, which is what most gamers do anyway. Right?

A sliver of a piece of hardware becomes a backup solution that consumes less electricity than most light bulbs, even CFLs.

A Green PC for Backups - Sub Ubi

The fit-PC draws 5W under load.

To put that in perspective, my MacBook has a 65W power adapter. A typical desktop has a 200W power supply. The fit-PC draws less juice from the wall than an energy saving light bulb. It is fanless, so the computer is no louder than the hard drive… (which, in an aluminum case, is going to be very, very quiet). That, and it’s small. A CD jewel case is 142 mm × 125 mm × 10 mm. The fit-PC is 116mm x 120mm x 40mm. That means it is as tall as four CD cases, and has a footprint that is smaller than those CD cases.

How green is your storage? - Infostor

The latest storage systems use disk drives with the highest capacities in history. Using these high-capacity drives allows users to drive down watts/terabyte in the data center. For example, migrating data stored on legacy 36/73/146GB Fibre Channel drives to newer, higher-capacity Fibre Channel or Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) drives can significantly improve power/cooling profiles. Similarly, migrating infrequently accessed application data to high-capacity SATA tiers will substantially improve storage energy efficiency.

Nexsan SASBoy touts green credentials - vnunet.com

Another differentiator say Nexsan is, that its SAS drives, come with AutoMAID, its intelligent power management system, which allows multiple levels of energy efficiency through user configurability. Woolery pointed out that, " Since this storage is aimed at tier two and thus is not active on a 24 x 7 basis, this gives an opportunity to save energy when drives are not being accessed."

Switch Vendors Call For Green Measurement Standards - CRN.com

In-Stat, meanwhile, is raising eyebrows with its recent study titled "Green Networking Equipment: Who Leads and Who Lags?" that ranked both 24-port and 48-port Gigabit Ethernet fixed managed Layer 2 and Layer 3 switches from more than a dozen vendors based on their fabric capacity (Gigabits per second) per watt. The study found that switches from 3Com, Netgear and SMC are among the most power efficient, while others like Cisco Systems, Nortel and ProCurve Networking by HP ranked quite low.

Cost-Effective Ways to Make IT Companies 'Green' - TMCnet

The report also highlights niche players in the power management software and hardware market as among the key beneficiaries of the drive to lower IT related energy consumption. It notes that while some manufacturers are using the 'eco-badge' to sell more equipment, IT companies have the choice of making small procedural changes that can reduce the energy requirements of their IT systems without investing in new equipment. As the recent oil price spike has coincided with a credit crunch, the report lists ways for IT companies to become more eco friendly without having to finance a complete upgrade of a corporate IT system.

Worst. Idea. Ever. Part II.

The idea of self-destructing DVDs didn't exactly pan out the first time. Environmentalists railed against it and consumers just yawned. But that's not stopping Staples and Flexplay this time around.

Today comes news that the office supply chain (?!) will soon start carrying Flexplay DVDs, the very same that become unwatchable after 48 hours, and will price them in rental territory ($5 give or take). However, they're now encouraging would-be users to recycle.

Yeah, right...

Staples, I admire you for your cell and printer cartridge recycling programs, but stick to your strengths and leave the DVD rental business to Netflix.

Flexplay, just stop. As much as you try to play up the recycling angle, it's disposable by its very nature. And you're banking on people's laziness (don't return that DVD, just recycle it), which is not a trait that's common to most of the entreprenuers, small business owners and DIYers that I have seen frequent Staples. Thirdly, you're gonna get steamrolled by digital distribution.

Lastly, it's wasteful in every regard. For that, Flexplay joins this gem in our Hall of Shame.

[via Engadget]