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Content about Environment

January 16, 2008

iSGTW Announcement - UC San Diego joins the Green Grid

Announcement - UC San Diego joins the Green Grid Where does it go? The Green Grid breaks down energy consumption in data centers, offering guidelines and recommendations for best practise.Image courtesy of The Green GridThe University of California San Diego has become the first university to join The Green Grid, a global consortium of companies dedicated to advancing energy efficiency in data centers and computing ecosystems.Membership in The Green Grid underscores the university’s commitment to environmentally sound practices, including efforts at the San Diego Supercomputer Center, a national-level supercomputer center funded by the National Science Foundation and UCSD.The SDSC is currently undergoing a “green” building expansion featuring a host of energy-saving designs, materials and practices, all intended to put the data center at the leading edge of operational efficiency. The 80,000 square-foot building, to open next year, earned the 2005 Best Practices Award for innovative heating, ventilation and air

September 12, 2007

iSGTW Feature - Grids point to pollution solutions

Feature - Grids point to pollution solutions eMinerals’ scientists are using grid computing to delve into the chemical substitutions that lead to arsenic contamination of drinking water. This image shows an arsenic atom (purple) substituted for a sulfur atom (cream) rather than an iron atom (red) in the structure of pyrite. Image courtesy of Kat Austen and Marc Blanchard eMinerals scientists will deliver new dirt on soil pollution at the 7th UK e-Science All Hands Meeting in Nottingham this week.The eMinerals team, funded by the UK’s Natural Environment Research Council, is using grid computing to tackle some serious environmental problems, including arsenic contamination of drinking water and dioxin pollution of soils. Over a series of thousands of calculations, researchers have simulated all possible interactions between dioxins and arsenic—extremely toxic pollutants—and the various rocks and soils in which they lurk.Fools’ arsenicArsenic often appears in minerals rich in iron and sulf

September 5, 2007

iSGTW Feature - Polar Grid: entering the ice age

Feature - Polar Grid: entering the ice age Polar grid will link the North and South Poles to teraflop facilities in the U.S., providing the massive power required to fill the gap in understanding of ice cap behavior in a changing climate.Images courtesy of Polar Grid “Things that took 100,000 years to change are now changing in ten years,” says Geoffrey Fox. “This was a relatively sleepy field. It has come rapidly to the forefront.”Fox is director of the Community Grids Lab at Indiana University’s Pervasive Technology Labs. A computer scientist by trade, he’s been swept into the fever of ice-sheet science.“In the last ten years something has happened,” he says. “Ten years ago the ice sheets weren’t melting. Now they are. And we don’t know why.” The need for information is critical. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report explicitly stated that understanding of ice flow dynamics is limited, that there is no consensus on the magnitude of i

August 29, 2007

iSGTW Opinion - Grids can be green

Opinion - Grids can be green Piles of cables and computer waste wait to be scrapped or reused in Guiyu, China.© Greenpeace, Guide to Green Electronics David Wallom is the technical manager of the Oxford e-Research Centre at the University of Oxford and chair of the UK e-Science Engineering Task Force. He is currently working on a JISC-funded Low Carbon Information and Communications Technology project. Can grids really be green? Grids have been designed to provide collaborating researchers with resources from many different physically disparate organisations. This has the advantage of ensuring that high-cost resources—in terms of initial purchase price and running costs—are operated as near to maximum capacity as possible. This means that, through correct management of related resources, grids have the potential to effectively lower an organisation’s overall carbon footprint.Disposing with pretenceHowever, we should also recognize the natural resources consumed to build these computing systems