Green Computing
Links
Here is a collection of links with quotes about green computing:
Green Software Foundation
https://greensoftware.foundation
Green software is software that is responsible for emitting fewer greenhouse gases. Our focus is reduction, not neutralisation.
https://greensoftware.foundation/manifesto
The Foundation's mission is to reduce the total change in global carbon emissions associated with software. When evaluating choices we choose the option that advocates for abatement (reducing emissions) not neutralisation (offsetting emissions).
https://learn.greensoftware.foundation/introduction
Green software is an emerging discipline at the intersection of climate science, software design, electricity markets, hardware, and data center design.
Green software is carbon-efficient software, meaning it emits the least carbon possible. Only three activities reduce the carbon emissions of software: energy efficiency, carbon awareness, and hardware efficiency.
How to be a green software practitioner:
- Carbon Efficiency: Emit the least amount of carbon possible.
- Energy Efficiency: Use the least amount of energy possible.
- Carbon Awareness: Do more when the electricity is cleaner and do less when the electricity is dirtier.
- Hardware Efficiency: Use the least amount of embodied carbon possible.
- Measurement: What you can't measure, you can't improve.
- Climate Commitments: Understand the exact mechanism of carbon reduction.
Electricity Maps
https://www.electricitymaps.com
Electricity Maps provides actionable electricity data for more than 160 regions. We help businesses more effectively reduce their emissions, and enable products and services to differentiate their offerings by empowering end-users to be more carbon-aware.
WattTime
WattTime is a nonprofit that offers technology solutions that make it easy for anyone to achieve emissions reductions without compromising cost, comfort, and function.
https://www.watttime.org/solutions/automated-emissions-reduction-aer
WattTime is a nonprofit founded to make it easy for manufacturers and operators of smart devices to go green this way without affecting their device performance, user comfort, or even cost. We’ve packaged this into a set of simple tools we call Automated Emissions Reduction, like real-time and forecast emissions data through our API.
Cloud Carbon Footprint
https://www.cloudcarbonfootprint.org
Cloud Carbon Footprint is an open source tool that provides visibility and tooling to measure, monitor and reduce your cloud carbon emissions. We use best practice methodologies to convert cloud utilization into estimated energy usage and carbon emissions, producing metrics and carbon savings estimates that can be shared with employees, investors, and other stakeholders.
CO2 Scope
https://www.easyvirt.com/en/co2scope-reduce-the-carbon-footprint-of-it-services
CO2 Scope is a solution to monitor in real-time the CO2 emissions of IT services, virtual machines, and servers. Providing automatic KPI, recommendations, and guidelines to reduce the environmental impact of IT, and involving technical and management objectives.
GreenFrame
GreenFrame is an open-source solution that allows developers to decarbonize their websites by detecting carbon leaks.
Analyse and find out how much Co2 your web application emits.
GreenFrame integrates into your CI pipeline to help you understand the impact of your changes and improve your development practices.
GreenFrame lets you write custom scenarios reflecting what people actually do on your website or application. Not just for idle pages!
Google Cloud
https://blog.google/outreach-initiatives/sustainability/carbon-aware-computing-location
Google can now shift moveable compute tasks between different data centers, based on regional hourly carbon-free energy availability.
Shifting compute tasks across location is a logical progression of our first step in carbon-aware computing, which was to shift compute across time. By enabling our data centers to shift flexible tasks to different times of the day, we were able to use more electricity when carbon-free energy sources like solar and wind are plentiful. Now, with our newest update, we’re also able to shift more electricity use to where carbon-free energy is available.
https://blog.google/inside-google/infrastructure/data-centers-work-harder-sun-shines-wind-blows
Our latest advancement in sustainability, developed by a small team of engineers, is a new carbon-intelligent computing platform. We designed and deployed this first-of-its kind system for our hyperscale (meaning very large) data centers to shift the timing of many compute tasks to when low-carbon power sources, like wind and solar, are most plentiful.
Microsoft Windows
Starting with Windows 11, version 22H2, Windows Update is now carbon aware, making it easier for your devices to reduce carbon emissions. When devices are plugged in, turned on, connected to the internet and regional carbon intensity data is available, Windows Update will schedule installations at specific times of the day (when doing so may result in lower-carbon emissions because a higher proportion of electricity is coming from lower-carbon sources on the electric grid).
Microsoft Xbox
https://news.xbox.com/en-us/2023/01/11/xbox-carbon-aware-console-sustainability
Xbox is now the first gaming console to offer carbon aware game downloads and updates.
When your console is plugged in, connected to the Internet and regional carbon intensity data is available, Xbox will schedule game, app, and OS updates for your console at specific times during the nightly maintenance window that may result in lower carbon emissions because a higher proportion of electricity is coming from lower-carbon sources on the electric grid.
Apple iPhone
https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT213323
With iOS 16.1, your iPhone can try to reduce your carbon footprint by selectively charging when lower carbon-emission electricity is available.
Dropbox
https://dropbox.tech/infrastructure/making-dropbox-data-centers-carbon-neutral
Maximizing power utilization: Across the industry, data centers are designed to power a specific power range. Any capacity that isn't used is wasted--at a cost both in dollars and environmental impact. At Dropbox, we aim to reach 85% capacity, a sweet spot for usage that's efficient yet still gives us extra capacity to handle power spikes.
Hardware Sentry
https://www.sentrysoftware.com/products/hardware-sentry.html
Hardware Sentry is a vendor-agnostic solution to monitor the health of physical and virtual disks, controllers, blade servers, SAN switches, tape libraries, network adapters, temperature sensors, etc. in your datacenter. The solution also reports on power consumption, electricity costs and CO2 emissions.
Increasing the data center temperature from 18°C to 27°C resulted in a decrease of 15% in energy required for air conditioning and 7% in carbon emissions.