[LINK] Green universities?

[Tom Worthington]

On 12/04/12 14:36, Nicholas English wrote:

> ... minimisation of the desktop footprint via virtualised services
> ...

There is not much point in removing the applications from the
desktop, if you still install large energy consuming desktop computers 
on the desktop, designed to run applications. These PCs will chew though 
power even when doing not very much and you may end up using more energy 
(and money) overall. Better to replace the desktop PCs with low energy 
units, just be powerful enough to run the user interface, or do away 
with the desktop units entirely and use portable or mobile devices.

> ... managing the backend energy requirements ...

One easy way to manage the back-end is to give the problem to someone 
else. Many Australian universities now outsource their learning
management system (usually Moodle) to be run by one of a small number of
companies which specialise in hosting education software. The
applications run on company servers, not at the universities. The 
companies can balance the load between campuses, as long as we do not 
all set the same deadline for student assignments. ;-)

> I was always disapointed that we couldn't manage to at least put the
>  Learning Precinct pcs into use overnight as a render farm make use
> of them for GIS analysis in a parralell array when students did go
> home. ...

Desktop PCs make poor parallel computers. Better to replace them
with low power devices and run the applications on a server. At night 
you can turn off the desktop units and use the server for something 
else. But a server designed for learning may not be much use for compute 
intensive applications.

It may be better to let a students on the other side of the world use 
your learning server at night and run compute intensive tasks on a 
system designed for that purpose. My collogues at ANU are investigating 
this under the wonderful title of "Heterogeneous Multicore Chip 
Architecture for supporting Virtualized Clusters and Clouds": 
http://cecs.anu.edu.au/projects/pid/0000000627

Recently three universities, located in time-zones equally spaced around
the world, ran a "follow the sun" conference continuously for 48 hours:
http://blog.tomw.net.au/search/label/fts12

Each campus took charge of the event during their own working day and
then handed on to the next when the sun went down. Perhaps the same
could be done for providing education: Each campus would have
servers and staff, to provide 24 hour education, backing each other up
and providing load balancing.


-- 
Tom Worthington FACS CP, TomW Communications Pty Ltd. t: 0419496150
PO Box 13, Belconnen ACT 2617, Australia  http://www.tomw.net.au
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Adjunct Senior Lecturer, Research School of Computer Science,
Australian National University http://cs.anu.edu.au/courses/COMP7310/