Description
OGF-EU: Using IT to reduce Carbon Emissions (1/4) (90 mins)
Ian Osborne, Intellect; Juan Caceres, Telefonica; Melanie Biette and James Ahtes, Atos Origin; David Wallom, OeRC; Ignacio Llorente, Universidad Complutense de Madrid; Laurent LeFevre, INRIA; Craig Le
In the age of climate change the concept of Green IT is becoming a hot topic within the ICT industry and society as a whole, as we seek to minimise our energy consumption for economic, legal, business strategic reasons and social corporate image to our customers and maximise the benefits accruing to the end users of our services. This is also an area of interest to the Policy Maker with discussions emerging of potential regulation of Data Centres, and a new Code of Conduct aimed at data centre owners in the European Union. What are the standards implications from this? What are the metrics/tools to measure the energy efficiency (e.g. Power Usage Effectiveness – PUE, Data Centre Efficiency - DCE)? How might we better orchestrate the use of shared infrastructure to reflect energy policy decisions (e.g. what equipment is to be used for what task, where and at what time?) and the distribution of workloads based on the energy requirements and the established policies. This session is aimed at bringing more light to the subject, following an introduction workshop at OGF 23 in Barcelona and the launch of the new Code of Conduct in November.
This session is intended to be a call to action to the community to work in key areas of contribution allowing us to:- a) design more efficient infrastructures with minimal carbon impact; b) operate the infrastructures in line with energy policies which allow the user to orchestrate the most efficient use of their energy resources; c) identify areas where standards can be developed to incorporate the necessary functionality. We intend illustrating the case for change by reference to recent moves in the regulatory environment in Europe, notably the EU Code of Conduct for Data Centres; as well as user case studies featuring advances in technologies which can assist in the efficient deployment of compute capability.
Agenda:
Our plan is to run a day long workshop (4*90 minute sessions) starting with a session reminding us of the context in which Green IT is meaningful and updating colleagues from around the world on progress made in their own communities. We will introduce expert speakers, describe the early “standards” work being done in governmental and industry agencies and have identified colleagues who can bring their own stories of Green IT in action in their own work environments as early case studies.
Speakers in the initial session include: Liam Newcombe, Romonet/BCS Data Centre Specialist Group – the architect of the EU Code of Conduct and developer of an engineering model for energy consumption in the data centre; and Paul Strong, Distinguished Scientist at e-Bay and OGF Board Member. We expect some user examples: Contributed by customers or collaborators of Atos Origin, Barcelona Supercomputing Centre and Telefonica.
Having framed the issue and identified the motivators and key stakeholders, we would then move on to working through the issue in more detail:-
We would like to consider some form of reference model for end to end energy management. Components may include:
• Monitoring (e.g. a sensor network)/Measuring
• Decision support tools (bringing the right advice to the environment)
• Enactment tools (e.g. Virtualisation, migration, rack power up/down)
We will need to work with an industry expert group to flesh these concepts out in order to bring the detail to the forum.
We would then close the workshop with a Call to action. Assuming that we have been successful in building the community and achieving a consensus on how to move forwards.
