Can computing be greener?
Meet Al Leon-Garcia and the cool world of cloud computing
For the most part, there’s nothing special about Al Leon-Garcia’s office in the Bahen Centre for Information Technology. There’s an expansive desk unit, a couple of personal computers, and shelves stuffed with books only an electrical and computing engineer would understand.
What stands out is a trellis that covers the big window that looks out onto U of T’s downtown campus. All over the trellis are lush, green vines and fat leaves, giving the workspace the look and feel of a botanical garden.
It’s fitting, too, that his office is a green oasis amid the white concrete walls of the Bahen building—Leon-Garcia is one of U of T’s chief proponents of making the vast global computing network part of the green revolution.
“Carbon emissions from the field of Information and Communications Technology (ICT) are relatively small now, about two per cent of total global carbon emissions, but it is growing fast. Computing is everywhere, all over the world in homes and every type of business and service. That’s a lot of power being used and using power creates carbon emissions. So the potential negative impact of ICT on the environment could be massive.”
But Leon-Garcia is conducting research in areas that can make ICT environmentally friendly—and that can change the computing industry completely. One of the key areas is called ‘cloud computing.’
Cloud computing (the name is derived from the cloud motif often used to denote the Internet by computer designers in flow charts and diagrams) is about assembling a massive network that feeds computer users software applications and power from a source called a datacentre. Instead of having a personal computer loaded with a host of software applications and reliance on its hard drive for application delivery, the datacentre provides all that. The computer user accesses them via the Web only when they’re needed—think Gmail. In fact, Google uses a datacentre approach to manage its huge computing needs.
“Internet traffic is driven by human behaviour. That means there’s a great variability in terms of when and how people use their computers. So you have to provide more computing to keep people happy. That costs money. But the big benefit of cloud computing is that you only use what you need, when you need it, which results in huge costs savings.”
But the datacentres are large and result in steep increases in electric power for servers and for cooling.
So a major part of Leon-Garcia’s work is ‘green’ cloud computing.
There are already effective measures in place that promote greener cloud computing. Sensors have been developed that can monitor air flow and temperatures, resulting in major improvements in power efficiency and reductions in carbon emissions. Many datacentres are powered by low-carbon emitting sources such as hydroelectric dams and wind or solar farms. And the use of optical networks has proven to be much more effective at conserving energy when transmitting large amounts of information over long distances than traditional copper wire.
The focus of Leon-Garcia’s research now is managing the variability of wind and solar power. “We have an infinite amount of wind and solar power to use, but the problem is that both of these sources are subject to interruptions in their availability. The challenge is how to develop a computing utility that delivers continuous service, despite the interruptions.”
His idea—design a management system that monitors the availability of power at datacentres located over a wide geographic region and that allocates and moves computing loads between datacentres.
“It’s tricky and there is a great deal of work to be done, but making cloud computing much more green is certainly possible,” says Leon-Garcia. “The upside is that our technological capabilities are so much greater now than they were when I got started 30 years ago. I did a calculation and it’s a million-fold improvement.
The problems we are trying to solve are massive, but we are so much more equipped to deal with them today.”