Green IT
Last week I had the pleasure of meeting Andrew Goodlace, the Australia New Zealand sales director, and ANU senior lecturer Tom Worthington. I was listening to the technology they were talking about and how Sun was way ahead in terms of power saving multi-core systems. It was interesting to hear, for example, that it was far more energy efficient to have a central server and run thin clients (@~15W) vs a PC (~@80W), and how thin clients enabled 3G cards to become widely available. Andrew then proceeded to tell me how he could take his card to any Sun office in the world, chuck it into one of the workstations and pull up his previous session without any hassles. Absolutely amazing technology :D
I also talked to Tom about some of the aspects software plays in energy efficiency. I had no idea software really had much of a bearing on power consumption, but then again I had never really considered how hard I was hitting my computer when I opened up thirty firefox windows with around 1000 tabs each. He said that in order to make something more efficient, we should take to optimising the code as we normally do and also try to cut down on the data that needs to be processed. He also went on to mention that government departments in Australia make a letterhead by plokking a huge picture into a word document and grabbing the edges until it looked ok, rather than actually putting it through a program that actually scales it. If we actually scaled these images instead of putting them straight into word documents, we could also save a huge amount of government bandwidth every year. It is always the simple things that have the biggest effect, and coming from a bizzarre hybrid of JavaScript and PHP, I really can attest to that :)
Posted at 12:39PM Oct 26, 2008 by Stephen Gream in Personal | Comments[0]