2008 IBM Academic Days Conference

Today it is the IBM Academic Days Conference...

Ian Abbott-Donnelly, European CTO, spoke on 'Big Green Innovations'

'Big Green Innovations' refers to IBM innovations. There is a separate IBM initiative to make datacentres more efficient (not really covered in the presentation).

Similar statistics were shown as at the Gartner briefing yesterday.

IBM advertised all the environmentally friendly activities they were engaged in...

IBM claims a retro fit to a datacentre will give 30-40% improvement. Re-building from scratch would give an 80% improvement in energy efficiency.

http://www.top500.org is said to have electricity costs for different supercomputers (but I cannot find it).

A comment was made re. reducing electrical consumption. This is likely to be necessary, not just to reduce carbon, but because the infrastructure will not be able to supply enough.

Gartner Higher Education Briefing: e-Learning, Green IT

An interesting meeting in Barcelona with two main topics.

The Future of e-Learning in Higher Education:

By 2001, many institutes had created established course management systems (as opposed to their teachers using a variety of management systems).

The question asked was: are we starting to see the end of the institute course management systems? Are many of the functions in the CMS being replaced with Web 2.0 services; which are supplied externally to the institute (wikis, social networks,...)?

It was agreed that the answer would be to use SOAs with well defined standards, so that it would be possible to integrate added services to a CMS framework. Cardiff is using this approach with Sakai as the underlying framework.

Many people are concerned that Blackboard acquired WebCT (and the forced migration of users of the latter) - and universities are now actively looking for Open Source alternatives (Moodle is the favourite, then Sakai).



Green IT

It is estimated that IT 's carbon contribution is 2% of the total (roughly the same scale as aviation).

But within higher education, for universities which do not run large pieces of scientific equipment, the IT share is estimated to be between 15 and 20% total.

{http://www.ghg.protocol.org enables you to do your own calculations.}

The consequence is that changes to IT can offer significant carbon savings within a university as a fraction of the whole.

The effects of ICT on environmental sustainability:

• Negative: Greenhouse gas emission in manufacture. waste, hazardous substances, use of scarce resources
• Positive: Travel substitution, transport optimisation, e-Business and e-Government, environmental controls systems

ICT's Global Emissions:-

• Printing (6%): mainly paper and not the energy to print
  
• LAN and Office Telecoms (7%): difficult to tackle
• Mobile Telecoms (9%)
• Fixed-Line Telecoms (15%)
• Servers including cooling - data centre (24%)
• PCs, etc (39%): focus should be here

The embodied energy for a PC (building and delivery) is estimated to be 70-80% of the total energy used by the PC (but this ratio is questioned by the manufacturers).

It is recommended to undertake an environmental assessment, and set targets for power consumption and carbon levels.

It is estimated that 2,500 PCs and laptops cost 64kEuros in electricity over a year. it is relatively easy to halve this.

Data Centres are intending to cut power by:

• virtualizing
• stopping over-provisioning
• using power management to throttle power based on use
• using a low power state or shutting servers down when not in use
• smart energy management (directing cooling)

http://www.epeat.net/ is a good site to help purchasers evaluate, compare and select desktop computers, notebooks and monitors based on their environmental attributes.

Towards Low Carbon ICT conference

The Low Carbon ICT conference, held in Oxford University, and organised by Howard Noble and his team, was most interesting. Details are at:-
http://projects.oucs.ox.ac.uk/lowcarbonict/conferences/conf-1.htm.

There were presentations on:-

• Low carbon ICT in context of Oxford University
• Low carbon approach in large hospital using virtualised servers
• A wonderful overview of reducing carbon in data centres
• Greening the full lifecycle (from manufacture through to recycling)
• Facebook meets green business
• Green technologies in the pipeline

I was very taken by the talk which addressed the power loss chain as applied to data centres. Liam Newcombe, of the BCS Data Centre Specialist Group, is acknowledged and thanked for the following slide:-


Just 0.5% of the energy of the fossil fuel is actually used to deliver power for computing.

When Liam's slides become available on the above web address, take a look and send your comments.

There is considerable scope for increasing the percentage if useful power used.

The Green Grid (http://www.thegreengrid.org/home) is a very interesting site. "The Green Grid is a global consortium dedicated to advancing energy efficiency in data centers and business computing ecosystems."

The conference agreed that the low carbon ICT area is going to grow and grow in importance.

Microsoft has offerd to buy Yahoo

"Microsoft has offered to buy the search engine company Yahoo for $44.6bn (£22.4bn) in cash and shares...."

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/7222114.stm

This must be driven by the competition from Google.

USC gets Google Apps in ad-free environment

A colleague brought to my attention a deal where the University of Southern California has agreed a deal with Google for Google Apps for Education to be installed in an ad-free environment. See:- http://www.usc.edu/uscnews/stories/14700.html.

"“Google Apps at USC is about more than e-mail,” Rhimes said. “The current generation of students study, network and socialize online. They want the freedom to work from multiple locations – including from different computers and mobile devices. Google Apps at USC offers them the flexibility that they want and need.

Because Google Apps at USC provides Web-based word processing, spreadsheet, calendar and chat programs, students can do their work anywhere they have Web access without worrying about downloading software or software compatibility. "

It is interesting to note that this is reserved just for students and not available to staff (how does it interoperate with the staff groupware provision?), and that it is ad-free.

Cambridge announces deployment of IT telephony

A press release yesterday (http://newsroom.cisco.com/dlls/2008/prod_010808.html) announced one of the largest IP telephony deployments in the education sector; a multi-million pound deal.

"The project will see BT, Cisco, and the University's IT Consultancy partner, PTS Consulting, deliver approximately 20,000 IP telephony handsets to the University over the next 18 months, replacing the existing system.

The University's investment will modernise the student experience, enabling students to collaborate in new and more innovative ways through the deployment of a converged voice, video and data network. Sharing information more easily will improve the quality of education and research, with students and academics using instant messaging, voice emails, streaming video and much more to share ideas in real time, from anywhere in the world."

This seems to be true convergence of communications and IT.

New to the game

This is my first ever blog and first ever blog entry.