cyberinfrastructure

The Big Green Monster: Does ICT Become Regarded as a Hero or a Villian by 2012?

Jerry Sheehan — Fri, 05 Sep 2008 11:15:20 -0700

Description

The debate about global climate change is effectively done with society slowly acknowledging our dramatic impact on the environment. At both the international and national level there are increased efforts to identify innovations or create new regulations to help us decrease our carbon footprint and greenhouse gas emissions.

As society, policy-makers, and regulators begin to look at ways to curb carbon emissions they will quickly begin to pay greater attention to the impact information communication technologies (ICT) has on energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions.

Consider a few of the amazing impacts of our Internet Economy:

-ICT Produces as Much of a Carbon Footprint as Aviation: As mentioned in a number of previous signals on X2, the ICT industry collectively produces as much carbon worldwide as does the Aviation industry.[1] What isn't often talked about is in the last two years Aviation has reduced their footprint 15% while the ICT industry has effectively doubled theirs![2]

-Racks Consume as Much Power as a House: A single rack of computers in a machine room consumes approximately as much energy as one household. This means that a modern machine room of hundreds if not thousands of racks can be thought of as having the energy demand as a small city. Nicholas Carr has done some interesting analysis that shows that the average energy consumption for an avatar in second-life is more then real humans consume on a daily basis. [3]

-Data Centers Are Operationally Challenged: Increasing use of our information infrastructure has led to a proliferation of data centers and put increased demands on the data centers already in existence. This year over 50% of data centers are anticipated to have insufficient energy and cooling to meet their operational needs.[4]

Paradoxically, this same infrastructure is also a powerful potential green enabler allowing us to tackle the challenges posed by global change.

Consider the positive:

-Technology Can Enable Virtual Commerce, Intelligent Transportation, Etc: By 2012, application of ICT to other sectors of the economy (e-trade, transportation, etc) will contribute to a reduction of 68 million tons of CO2 in Japan. This reduction is roughly equivalent to about 6% of the CO2 produced by the nation in 1990.[5]

-Telepresence Reduces the Need For Face2Face Meetings: Cisco's Telepresence units have been deployed in 191 cities. In the last year 85,854 telepresence meetings were held resulting the the elimination of 13,450 face to face meetings. The environmental impact from this shift is the equivalent of taking 6,775 cars off the road.[6]

Conclusion?
It is unclear at this point which of the sides of our technological double edge sword society will understand first. If ICT positions itself as an enabler for innovation in dealing with global climate change we see a second wave of the Internet economy fueled by efforts to create more sustainable and efficient infrastructure. However, if regulators begin to look for ways to quickly deal with imposed caps for greenhouse gas reductions, ICT may find itself the new target of substantial regulation.

[1]"An Inefficient Truth", Global Action Plan, 2008, http://www.globalactionplan.org.uk/event_detail.aspx?eid=2696e0e0-28fe-4121-bd36-3670c02eda49[2] Rich Lechner, Vice President for Green Initiatives, IBM, August 28, 2008
[3] "Avatars Consume As Much Electricity as Brazilians", Nicholas Carr, ROUGH TYPE, December 05, 2006, http://www.roughtype.com/archives/2006/12/avatars_consume.php
[4] North American Network Operators Group, 2007, http://www.nanog.org/mtg-0802/levy.html
[5] Dr Yuri Inoue, International Telecommunications Union,
[6] Cisco, March 22, 2008

Signals

Reducing supercomputer power consumption

IBM Premieres Project Big Green in Hollywood

Global warming melts tundra, unlocking greenhouse gases

"The cloud" - on-demand distributed computing power

Andrew Walkingshaw — Sat, 10 May 2008 16:25:00 -0700

Description

Simulation scientists are mostly limited by both the number, and the speed, of the computers available to them. Really large simulations need really serious computer resources, but simulations like that are pretty rare; so the resources for them have been concentrated in regional grids or national centres like the UK's HPCx.

Economically this makes a lot of sense, but there's a lot of overhead; for instance, compute time has to be bid for long in advance of when it might actually be used. In that light, commodity on-demand computing services like Amazon's EC2 begin to look promising as an alternative; they have even greater economies of scale than the national infrastructure services, can provide a scientist with more CPU power at essentially no notice, and often provide more flexibility in choice of operating system and software than a centrally-provided system can. At the moment, they don't scale to the massively parallel calculations that the national supercomputers specialize in, but sooner or later they'll be competitive even for those cases.

Computer & Information Science

Source

http://www.grid-support.ac.uk/content/view/239/157/
http://www.hpcx.ac.uk/
http://aws.amazon.com/ec2

Public cyberinfrastructure enabling scientific hobbyists

Jerry Sheehan — Wed, 12 Dec 2007 09:21:09 -0800

Description

Humanity has a history of using "distributed labor" to solve problems too large for any one individual. However, in the past these efforts have been limited by the "efficiency" of the best available technology accessible to the public. For example, the contextual definitions found in the Oxford English Dictionary were first assembled in the late 1800s by mailing out "word" postcards to users who would search for contextual use, document their source, and then send the postcard back to the editor. This snail-mail based infrastructure, and the breadth of the enterprise, is one of the reasons it took 49 years for the first copy of OED (initially called the New English Dictionary on Historical Principles) to be published. [1][2]

Our advanced cyberinfrastructure has gone from being in only a few leading academic research labs to being generally accessible to the public. Children now have "game machines" that surpass the computational processing power of supercomputers from the 1980s connected at broadband speeds that are an order of magnitude beyond the initial data network (NSFnet) used for scientific collaboration.

Interestingly as the technology foundation has increased so have our efforts to enlist volunteers in the scientific enterprise. These efforts have moved beyond the realm of simply using their idle computing problems (SETI@Home) to actively involving them in the scientific enterprise. Perhaps one of the more interesting projects in this regards in the Herbaria@home project. Volunteers have used a web based form to transcribe shorthand notation on 12,000 samples in the Manchester Museum into an electronic database. (see attached image for form).[3] Scientific software developers at Berekely have taken the challenge of amateur involvement seriously enough to create the Berekely Open System for Skill Aggregation (Bossa) to provide an infrastructure for distributed cyberinfrastructure based problem solving. [4][5]Hebraria@home: Screen Shot of Web Form for Herbraria

What will the growth of this public infrastructure mean for science?

First, and foremost, the spread of our advanced cyberinfrastructure to the public will increase the number of amateur scientific volunteers who will help gather, analyze, and discuss scientific data. Efforts will range from the continued donation of "spare" computational cycles from personal computing/gaming devices to active involvement in annotating specimens, uploading data from personal sensing devices, and running of experiments. The net positive impact of these efforts will be an increased scientific literacy among what could be called the scientific hobbyist.

Second, the scientific and software development community, will need to develop a variety of tools for validating amateur based observation and analysis. Apart from efforts such as BOSSA we will likely begin to see known scientific rules inoculated into expert algorithms which will identify observations that are aberrant.

Third, it is likely that a subset of scientific hobbyist will find themselves at odds with scientific professionals. This tension between public perception and expert knowledge can already be found online in an examination of anti-immunization web sites which cull selective snippets of data to prove their point. This tension will make it increasingly important for us to have open discourse on scientific topics which are accessible to the lay audience.

[1] The Professor and the Madman, Simon Winchester, 1998.
[2] Oxford English Dictionary Timeline, Everything2.com, Oxford English Dictionary@Everything2.com
[3]Herbaria@home stats, news and progress
[4] "Spreading the Load", The Economist, December 6, 2007.
[5] Berkeley Open System for Skills Aggregation, see BossaIntro - BOINC - Trac

Signals

herbaria@home

Berkeley Open System for Skill Aggregation