Cooking the data
Posted by Charles II on January 12, 2009
From the Beeb:
US physicist Alex Wissner-Gross claims that a typical Google search on a desktop computer produces about 7g CO2.
However, these figures were disputed by Google, who say a typical search produced only 0.2g of carbon dioxide.
A recent study by American research firm Gartner suggested that IT now causes two percent of global emissions.
Dr Wissner-Gross’s study claims that two Google searches on a desktop computer produces 14g of CO2, which is the roughly the equivalent of boiling an electric kettle.
I am pretty sure that Wissner-Gross is wrong. If he’s not, Google should couple power generation to their server farm, ’cause there are a lot of Google searches.
George Lowry said
This story is on Slashdot.
Tagged as “junk science”, “flamebait”,”pointless” etc.
Charles II said
Thanks, George. The URL is here. It doesn’t provide any support for the matter one way or another, however.
I heard a venture presentation related to this issue almost a decade ago. It was plausible and based on hard data. The argument was that at the rate of growth of IT, we needed to find ways to reduce power consumption so that IT does not become a significant contributor to global warming. Of course, gains in power efficiency since then have rendered the extrapolations wildly in error.
Phoenix Woman said
A lot of server farms take the waste heat and use it for other purposes, such as heating nearby municipal swimming pools.
Stormcrow said
I have my doubts about IT being a significant contributor to global warming.
But I have no doubt at all about server rooms being unreasonable producers of waste heat. I’ve had to work in too many of them.
The only mitigations I can think of offhand are
(1) Decrease the scale of integration. 45 nanometers should produce less waste heat than 90, all other things being equal.
(2) Increase the degree of parallelism. Then, you can throw more processors at a given task, to compensate for reducing the clock speeds of the ones you’re using.
(3) Go to a different material than silicon.
(4) Salvage and re-use the waste heat, as PW describes above.
I don’t think we’re going through Door Number 3 anytime soon.
Options (1) and (2), are, of course, in process everywhere you look. Try buying a new Intel or AMD whitebox computer that isn’t multi-core today. Even the laptops ship with dual-core CPUs.