[LINK] Energy measures for e-Tax tender

[Tom Worthington]

At 04:21 PM 28/11/2008, Michael Still wrote:
>Bernard Robertson-Dunn wrote:
>>Tom ... Can you explain how a software developer can tell how much 
>>energy and  CO2 emissions his code will require ...
>
>... the design of the system can heavily influence its effect on the 
>environment, largely by forcing the deployment of more machines to 
>make it scale. ...

Yes, that is what I had in mind. The software developer should know 
what system resources the application will need to run (storage, 
processing and communications) and therefore how much CO2 equivalent 
would be produced, running on typical hardware.

>I wonder what percentage of carbon outputs world wide are from datacenters?

Jodi Newcombe from the Climate Group talked at the Sustainable ICT 
Symposium in Melbourne this week. Their report: "SMART 2020: Enabling 
the low carbon economy in the information age" estimates that 
datacenters produced 14% of ICT emissions (telecommunications 37% and 
PCs and printers 49%).

Unfortunately the climate group produced their report as a large, CO2 
generating, PDF document. I did a small HTML summary for my Green ICT 
students, with a link to the full report, at: 
<http://tomw.net.au/moodle/mod/resource/view.php?id=227>.

The Green ICT students will be doing exercises on how much energy 
computer applications need to run and therefore their greenhouse gas 
effects. This should be a routine part of software design within a 
couple of years.

The ACS will start taking enrollments for the Green ICT course in the 
next few days, with the first semester beginning in January 2009: 
<http://www.acs.org.au/cpeprogram/index.cfm?action=show&conID=greenict>. 
I hope to have a masters level course running at ANU by mid 2009.



Tom Worthington FACS HLM tom.worthington at tomw.net.au Ph: 0419 496150
Director, Tomw Communications Pty Ltd            ABN: 17 088 714 309
PO Box 13, Belconnen ACT 2617                      http://www.tomw.net.au/
Adjunct Senior Lecturer, Australian National University