Internet's Energy Needs Growing Faster Than Efficiency Gains 158
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."
What? (Score:5, Insightful)
You lost me there.
Is that per hour ? (Score:2, Insightful)
270 terawatt hours! Is that per hour I wonder ?
270 terrawatt hours (Score:4, Insightful)
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!
Re: Electrons may not weigh anything (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Make internet privacy an environmental issue. (Score:3, Insightful)
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?
Re:270 terrawatt hours (Score:5, Insightful)
Which of course, raises the question, why couldn't you just bloody SAY "31 Gigawatts" instead of tangling yourself in this foofaral of extraneous time units that you didn't even get right?