Greening the Computer Grid

Lately, in the world of heavy computing the buzzword isn’t processor power – its electricity and efficiency. Energy consumption and cooling capacity have steadily become something of a pandemic in the information technology industry and the effects are being felt everywhere – from hospitals in Pomona Valley to the giant data centers of Google and Yahoo. In fact, some estimates place total data center electricity costs at $3.3 billion annually, with the number of servers expected to grow by 50 percent over the next four years. Clearly this is an issue the industry is going to have to face.

Several industry leaders, including AMD, HP, Sun Microsystems and IBM, have announced The Green Grid, a new non-profit association formed to share best practices in data center energy efficiency and to develop solutions to address growing power and cooling costs. Sponsors of the initiative kicked things off with a formal announcement at the Server Blade Summit April 19th in Garden Grove, CA.

“Data center power consumption is a growing global concern on both a business and environmental level,” said Marty Seyer, AMD senior vice president, commercial and performance computing. “The Green Grid was founded in order to bring the brightest minds in the industry together to help define innovative energy solutions that will improve performance-per-watt across the industry, today and tomorrow.”

The Green Grid will also attempt to address a number of industry issues. Plans are currently underway to establish new standards for measuring server efficiency.

The effort is designed to attract a wide range of sponsors and members to be part of a collaborative environment. In addition, the Green Grid is committed to working closely with both the Environmental Protection Agency and the Alliance to Save Energy to improve energy efficiency in the global data center and server market.