The processing power of ICT hardware has followed Moore's
Law for several decades: energy efficiency has improved nowhere near as
rapidly, and something has to be done.
It was the second award for their collaboration. Earlier
this year Alcatel-Lucent won the telecoms industry's ACOMM award for
environmental responsibility for its work with CEET. The company's response to
that, however, was not one of unalloyed gratitude: it was described by
Alcatel-Lucent Australia managing director, Seán O'Halloran, as "a hollow
victory."
The reason? There were no other contenders for the award, a
fact that O'Halloran says reflects badly on the priority the industry as a
whole is assigning to its surging energy consumption.
Announcing receipt of the latest award, CEET said: "Today
communications technology consumes up to two percent of the world's electricity
supply but…rapid growth in broadband demand could lift Internet energy
consumption to five to 10 percent of the world's electricity supply and
associated emissions by the year 2020."
Scary stuff. Or scaremongering? Most likely the former.
Announcement of the collaboration award co-incided with publication of the
latest edition (Vol 62, No 5 November 2012) of the Telecommunications Journal
of Australia (www.tja.org.au). In addition to a paper by O'Halloran - the
source of his 'hollow victory' comment - it contains several others focussed on
the nexus between information processing and energy consumption.
Perhaps the most striking observation to emerge is that there
is little relationship between the impressive advances that flow from the
fulfilment of the prediction best known as Moore's Law and increasing energy
efficiencies.
In another paper in the journal CEET's deputy director,
Kerry Hinton, said that if a unit of processing power cost $3000 in 2000, the
same money in 2015 would likely buy 64 units, but while it might have cost only
$150 per year to power and cool that one unit in 2000, the cost to power and
cool those 64 units in 2015 would likely be $3000 per year. In other words,
only a threefold efficiency increase, assuming constant power costs. (The cost
to power and cool 64 units at 2000 rates would be $9600.
This changing metric of power consumption per dollar of
processing power capex produces some startling statistics - spelt out in
another TJA paper by Bob Hayward, CTO for CSC
Australia and Asia.
- Globally, data centres
consumer more power than the entire country of Russia;
- the largest user of electricity in the UK is Government
ICT;
- electricity consumption by data centres is doubling ever
seven to 10 years.
And, to make it personal: an Australian who regularly visits
the virtual world (frequency and type of visits were not specified) consumes as
much electricity in a year by doing so as the average citizen in Brazil for all
purposes.
Taken together there is only on conclusion from these
metrics: the present trajectory is not sustainable.
Solutions posited in the various TJA papers covered a broad
range. There is significant effort being directed through CEET and a global
organisation known as GreenTouch (www.greentouch.org) to greatly increase the
energy efficiency of information processing technologies. GreenTouch has the
goal of reducing the energy consumption of telecommunications networks by a
factor of 1000.
That may seem inordinately ambitious, but if you marry it to
the projection from Nokia that mobile network capacity will have to increase
1000 fold by 2020 then it amounts to merely maintaining current levels, in one
area at least.
Another argument is that ICT can do much to increase energy
efficiencies in other areas, thus compensating for its gargantuan energy
appetite.
No doubt progress will be made on these and other fronts,
but it's seems clear that substantial, and rapid progress will be needed on
several fronts if current projections on the rise of cloud computing, number of
connected devices, global internet traffic and any other indicator of ICT
momentum you care to name are to be achieved.
O'Halloran sees the opportunity for Australia to become a
world leader in the field. He expects momentum to build quickly in areas like
consumer awareness and the development of a framework for an Internet energy
star rating, which he describes as "an extraordinarily complex initiative
already on the drawing boards at CEET."
But he says that progress will not be achieved without the
broader Australian telecommunications sector "having the courage and
vision to encourage collaboration between some unlikely players."
Given that many industry players are in fierce competition
with each other this seems like a call for some organisation that can transcend
that competition to take some initiative to seize this significant opportunity.
No comments:
Post a Comment