Green Computing
INTRODUCTION
Green computing refers to the practice and procedures of using computing resources in an environment friendly way while maintaining overall computing performance. Global warming is the continuing rise in the average temperature of the Earth climate system due to a range of factors. Scientific understanding of the various causes of global warming has been increasing since the last decade. Climate change and associated impacts vary from region to region across the globe. Nowadays, weather behaviour is becoming extremely unpredictable throughout the globe.
United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) is working relentlessly to achieve its objective of preventing dangerous anthropogenic (humaninduced) climate change. Owing to global warming, various regulations and laws related to environmental norms forces manufacturers of I.T equipments to meet various energy requirements. Green computing is a well balanced and sustainable approach towards the achievement of a greener, healthier and safer environment without compromising technological needs of the current and future generations.
This paper is a survey of several important literature related to the field of green computing that emphasises the importance of green computing for sustainable development.
Green computing, Green ICT as per IFG International Federation of Green ICT and IFG Standard, green IT, or ICT sustainability, is the study and practice of environmentally sustainable computing or IT
[1]. San Murugesan
[2] notes that Green IT areas the study and practice of designing, manufacturing, using, and disposing of computers, servers, and associated sub systems ”such as monitors, printers, storage devices, and networking and communications systems are” efficiently and effectively with minimal or no impact on the environment".
[3] lays out the following four paths along which he believes the environmental effects of computing should be addressed:
1. Green Use: Reducing the energy consumption of computers and other information systems as well as using them in an environmentally sound manner.
2. Green Disposal: Refurbishing and reusing old computers and recycling unwanted computers and other electronic equipment.
3. Green Design: Designing energy efficient and environmentally sound components, computers, servers and cooling equipments.
4. Green Manufacturing: Manufacturing electronic components, computers and other associated sub systems with minimal impact or no impact on the environment.
These four paths cover a number of central areas and activities such as: design for environmental sustainability energy-efficient computing power management data center design, layout and location, server virtualization, responsible disposal and recycling regulatory compliance green metrics, assessment tools and methodology, environment-related risk mitigation use of renewable energy sources and eco-labelling of IT products. Green computing is all about the efficient use of computers and computing.
Green computing can also develop solutions that offer benefits by "aligning all IT processes and practices with the core principles of sustainability, which are to reduce, reuse, and recycle; and finding innovative ways to use IT in business processes to deliver sustainability benefits across the enterprise and beyond".
The goals of green computing are quite similar to green chemistry which are to reduce the use of hazardous materials, maximize energy efficiency during the product's lifetime, and promote the recyclability or biodegradability of non-operational products and factory waste.
IT departments of many corporate are investing both time and money in green computing initiatives to reduce the environmental impact of their IT operations.
II. SURVEY OF LITERATURE In this section a survey of some very important literature on green computing is carried out under the following subheadings.
A. Environment And I.T Widespread use of computers and related IT products has a very bad effect on the environment. Various environmental issues and problems due to the impact of I.T on environment are discussed below:
1) Environmental issues: As we all know greenhouse gases are having a devastating and long lasting harmful effect on our atmosphere and environment. The growing accumulation of greenhouse gases is changing the world climate and weather patterns in an alarming way. Accumulation of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere is slowly increasing global temperature. Global data shows that storms, droughts, and other weather-related disasters are growing more severe and occurring more frequently than ever before. Electricity is a major cause of climate change, because the thermal power plants that help generate electricity also releases huge amount of carbon dioxide and many other harmful particles into the atmosphere. These emissions cause serious respiratory diseases, smog, acid rain and global climate change.
Reducing electric power consumption and producing electricity in more eco-friendly way is a key to reduce carbon dioxide emissions and their impact on our environment and global warming. More importantly weather behaviour to a large extent has become unpredictable. The sea-level is also increasing alarmingly because due to global warming the arctic glaciers are melting as never before. Leaders of all countries are very much worried and keen to stop the accumulation of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.
They are of the opinion that global emissions of greenhouse gases would have to stop growing to curb the menace of greenhouse effect.
Green I.T Advantages The following are some of the advantages of green I.T:
1. Enterprises with the technology and vision to produce products and services that address environmental issues enjoy a competitive edge because many customers when making purchasing, leasing, or outsourcing decisions, have started to consider the service providers environmental records and initiatives.
2. Organizations face lower energy costs and even save a lot on government taxes when they follow government policies on environment and produce goods following strict environment norms. 3. Investors and consumers are beginning to demand more disclosures from companies with regard to their carbon footprint as well as their environmental initiatives and achievements, and they have started discounting share prices of companies that poorly address the environmental problems they create. As a result of which, many businesses have begun showing their environmental credentials. For instance, the Carbon Disclosure Project is a recent initiative to request global companies to disclose their carbon emissions.
C. Adoption Of Green Computing The following factors are impacting data centers as well as desktop computers, though to a lesser degree, and driving the need to adopt green computing practices:
I) Rapid Growth Of The Internet: More and more people are increasingly relying on electronic data. There has been a rapid adoption of internet communications and media, computerization of business processes and applications, legal requirements for record retentions and disaster recovery. All these have led to the rapid growth in the size and number of data centers. On an individual level video and music downloads, on-line gaming, social networking site visits and VoIP are key drivers. Industry is also using internet increasingly. Internet usage is growing at more than 10 percent annually leading to an estimated 20% CAGR in data center demand.Disaster recovery strategies that emphasises on maintaining duplicate records increases demand further. Many federal, state, and local government agencies have adopted e-government strategies that utilize the Web for public information, reporting, transactions, homeland security, and scientific computing.
II) Increasing Equipment Power Density: Although advances in server CPUs have in some cases enabled higher performance with less power consumption per CPU, overall server power consumption has continued to increase as more servers are installed with higher performance power-hungry processors with more memory capacity. As more servers are installed they require more floor space. To pack more servers in the same footprint the form factor of servers has become much smaller, in some cases shrinking by more than 70% through the use of blade servers. This increase in packaging density has been matched by a major increase in the power density of data centers. Density has increased more than ten times from 300 watts per square foot in 1996 to over 4,000 watts per square foot in 2007, a trend that is expected to continue its upward spiral.
III) Increasing Cooling Requirements: The increase in server power density has led to a associated increase in data center heat density. Servers require approximately 1 to 1.5 watts of cooling for each watt of power used. The ratio of cooling power to server power requirements will continue to increase as data center server densities increase.
IV) Increasing Energy Costs: Data center expenditures for power and cooling can exceed that for equipment over the useful life of a server. One study estimated that for a typical $4,000 server rated at 500 watts, it would consume approximately $4,000 of electricity for power and cooling over three years, at $0.08 per kilowatt-hour, and double that in Japan [15]. The ratio of power and cooling expense to equipment expenses have increased from approximately 0.1 to 1 in 2000 to 1 to 1 in 2007. With the likely increase in the number of data centers and servers and the advent of a carbon cap-and-trade scheme, the cost of energy for data center power and cooling will increase continuously.
V) Restrictions On Energy Supply And Access: Companies such as Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo with the need for large data centers may not be able to find power at any price in major American cities. Therefore, they have built new data centers in the Pacific Northwest near the Columbia River where they have direct access to low-cost hydroelectric power and this has proved beneficial to them because they do not depend on the overtaxed electrical grid. In states such as, California, Illinois, and New York, the old electrical infrastructure and high costs of power can stall or stop the construction of new data centers and limit the operations of existing centers. In some crowded urban areas utility power feeds are at capacity and electricity is not available for new data centers at any price.
VI) Low Server Utilization Rates: Data center efficiency is a major problem in terms of energy use. The server utilization rates average 5-10 per cent for large data centers. Low server utilization means companies are overpaying for energy, maintenance, operations support, while only using a small percentage of computing capacity.
VII) D. Eco Friendly Practices Below some environment friendly approaches are discussed:
I) End User: Most personal desktop computers run even when they aren being used, wasting enormous amount of electricity. Users should not leave them on unnecessarily. Computers generate heat and require cooling, which adds to the total power consumption and cost for the enterprise. While the savings in energy costs per PC may not seem like much, the collective savings for hundreds of computers in an enterprise is considerably high. If proper eco-friendly measures are followed an enterprise may save lot of money and consequently have an increased profit margin. Such an enterprise will have a competitive edge as compared to its competitors.
PC energy consumption can be reduced by adopting several excellent measures as given below:
a. Enabling power management features: Without sacrificing performance, computers can be programmed to automatically power down to an energy-saving state when idle. The US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) estimated that providing computers with a sleep mode reduces their energy use by 60,70 percent. Because PCs are widely used across any given organization, it is very difficult for the IT staff of any organization to manage their organizationâs PC power consumption prudently. In this case, a pragmatic approach is to use software such as Surveyor from Verdiem that offers network-level control over PCs and monitors. The software places the PC into a lower-power consumption mode, such as shutdown, hibernation, or standby, and monitors into a sleep mode when they are idle. Besides, it also measures and reports how much power each PC and monitor consumes. Network managers can remotely awake the PCs for software upgrades, maintenance, or backup.
b. Using thin client computer: Users can choose to deploy thinclient computers which draw about a fifth of the power of a desktop PC.
c. Using screensavers: A blank screensaver conserves more power than a screensaver that displays moving images, which continually interacts with the CPU. But even that reduces the monitors energy expenditure by only a small percentage.
The end user may also follow the following tips for reducing energy consumption:
a. Printing: Printing should be done prudently and only those pages should be printed that are absolutely indispensable. Apart from electricity this will save lot of paper and consequently lower cutting down of trees.
b. Refilling: Refilling of ink cartridges and laser toners are cheaper and does not add to landfill. Hence should be carried out.
c. Switching off:
I.T hardware devices should be turned off when not in use. II) Old Computer: Old unwanted computers and monitors shouldn’t be thrown away in rubbish bins, as they will then end up in landfills causing serious environmental problems. Instead, they should be refurbished and reused or recycled in environmentally sound ways. Otherwise this will result in irreparable damage to the environment.
Below is a brief outline of the methods that can be followed to achieve the goal:
a. Reuse: An old computer should continue to be used if it meets the user requirements. Otherwise, it can be given to someone who needs it or the functional components may be used from a retired product. By using the hardware for a longer period of time, the total environmental footprint caused by computer manufacturing and disposal will be reduced greatly. b. Refurbish: Old computers and servers can be refurbished to meet new requirements. An old computer and other IT hardware can be made almost new again by reconditioning and replacing their parts. Rather than buying a new computer, refurbished IT hardware can be bought from the market. Nowadays, more enterprises are open to purchasing refurbished goods, and the market for refurbished IT equipment is growing. From the green angle, reusing is a better long-term way of managing resources. Financially speaking, it is more sensible as outward cash flow and capital expenditures are reduced. If these options are unsuitable, the outdated equipments can be donated to charities or schools or computers can be traded. Charities refurbish old computers and give them to those in need.
c. Recycle: When computers cannot be reused, even after considering the prospects of refurbishing, they must be disposed properly in environmentally friendly ways. Vast majority of unwanted computers and electronic goods end up in landfills. Electronic waste or e-waste—is one of the fastest-growing waste types, and the problem of e-waste is a global threat. Analysts predict that two-thirds of the estimated 870 million PCs made worldwide in the next five years will end up in landfills. The United Nations Environment Program estimates that 20 to 50 million tons of e-waste are generated worldwide each year, and this is increasing at an alarming rate.
Apart from containing toxic materials like lead, chromium, cadmium, and mercury, computer components contain many other harmful materials. If computers are buried in landfills, harmful chemicals from them may leak into waterways and the environment. If burned, they release toxic gases into the air we breathe, so if e-waste is not discarded properly, it will be harmful to the environment and people. On the other hand, e-waste can be a valuable source for secondary raw materials. Old electronic systems should be recycled by taking component material and reprocessing it into the same material or breaking it down into constituent materials for reuse.
G. Industry Associations Below is given a brief outline of some of the industry associations related to green computing:
I) Green Grid: The Green Grid is a voluntary international non-profit organization, the main purpose of which is to develop standards to measure data center efficiency including both the facilities and the equipment inside. Member companies share information about processes and technologies that can help data centers improve performance against those metrics. Board members include Intel, IBM, Microsoft, AMD, HP, Dell, EMC, APC, and Sun.
II) The Climate Savers Computing Initiative: Climate Savers Computing Initiative member companies commit to purchasing energy-efficient desktops and servers, and to broadly deploying power management strategies. By openly declaring their support for this effort, companies express their commitment to the greening of IT and join other industry-leading companies and organizations in corporate social responsibility and sustainable IT. Board members are CSC, Dell, Google, HP, Intel, Lenovo, Microsoft, and the World Wildlife Fund.
II) The Uptime Institute: The Uptime Institute Inc. provides educational and consulting services for organizations interested in maximizing data center uptime and sustainable IT. The Institute has pioneered industry standards which rate data center availability. The Uptime Network has 100 mostly Fortune 100 sized members. The Institute promotes learning among its members and provides conferences, site tours, benchmarking, best practices, and abnormal incident collection and analysis. Apart from these, it also certifies data center tier levels and site resiliency.
CONCLUSION
can be observed that green computing is the need of the hour to protect the environment. As more and more time passes the need of computers as a dependable machine increases and so does its use. So computer penetration is increasing globally at an amazing rate. This makes it all the more necessary to maintain green computing procedures throughout the life cycle of a computer from manufacturing through day-to-day operation till the end of its operating stage. In this regard according to David Wang, the data center architecture of Teradata, are Every step consumes energy and buying a new, more efficient computer may not always be the right answer. Thus, it can be safely concluded that in order to have a healthy and clean environment all stake holders must work collaboratively for a healthier and greener environment for our future generations.
INTRODUCTION
Green computing refers to the practice and procedures of using computing resources in an environment friendly way while maintaining overall computing performance. Global warming is the continuing rise in the average temperature of the Earth climate system due to a range of factors. Scientific understanding of the various causes of global warming has been increasing since the last decade. Climate change and associated impacts vary from region to region across the globe. Nowadays, weather behaviour is becoming extremely unpredictable throughout the globe.
United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) is working relentlessly to achieve its objective of preventing dangerous anthropogenic (humaninduced) climate change. Owing to global warming, various regulations and laws related to environmental norms forces manufacturers of I.T equipments to meet various energy requirements. Green computing is a well balanced and sustainable approach towards the achievement of a greener, healthier and safer environment without compromising technological needs of the current and future generations.
This paper is a survey of several important literature related to the field of green computing that emphasises the importance of green computing for sustainable development.
Green computing, Green ICT as per IFG International Federation of Green ICT and IFG Standard, green IT, or ICT sustainability, is the study and practice of environmentally sustainable computing or IT
[1]. San Murugesan
[2] notes that Green IT areas the study and practice of designing, manufacturing, using, and disposing of computers, servers, and associated sub systems ”such as monitors, printers, storage devices, and networking and communications systems are” efficiently and effectively with minimal or no impact on the environment".
[3] lays out the following four paths along which he believes the environmental effects of computing should be addressed:
1. Green Use: Reducing the energy consumption of computers and other information systems as well as using them in an environmentally sound manner.
2. Green Disposal: Refurbishing and reusing old computers and recycling unwanted computers and other electronic equipment.
3. Green Design: Designing energy efficient and environmentally sound components, computers, servers and cooling equipments.
4. Green Manufacturing: Manufacturing electronic components, computers and other associated sub systems with minimal impact or no impact on the environment.
These four paths cover a number of central areas and activities such as: design for environmental sustainability energy-efficient computing power management data center design, layout and location, server virtualization, responsible disposal and recycling regulatory compliance green metrics, assessment tools and methodology, environment-related risk mitigation use of renewable energy sources and eco-labelling of IT products. Green computing is all about the efficient use of computers and computing.
Green computing can also develop solutions that offer benefits by "aligning all IT processes and practices with the core principles of sustainability, which are to reduce, reuse, and recycle; and finding innovative ways to use IT in business processes to deliver sustainability benefits across the enterprise and beyond".
The goals of green computing are quite similar to green chemistry which are to reduce the use of hazardous materials, maximize energy efficiency during the product's lifetime, and promote the recyclability or biodegradability of non-operational products and factory waste.
IT departments of many corporate are investing both time and money in green computing initiatives to reduce the environmental impact of their IT operations.
II. SURVEY OF LITERATURE In this section a survey of some very important literature on green computing is carried out under the following subheadings.
A. Environment And I.T Widespread use of computers and related IT products has a very bad effect on the environment. Various environmental issues and problems due to the impact of I.T on environment are discussed below:
1) Environmental issues: As we all know greenhouse gases are having a devastating and long lasting harmful effect on our atmosphere and environment. The growing accumulation of greenhouse gases is changing the world climate and weather patterns in an alarming way. Accumulation of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere is slowly increasing global temperature. Global data shows that storms, droughts, and other weather-related disasters are growing more severe and occurring more frequently than ever before. Electricity is a major cause of climate change, because the thermal power plants that help generate electricity also releases huge amount of carbon dioxide and many other harmful particles into the atmosphere. These emissions cause serious respiratory diseases, smog, acid rain and global climate change.
Reducing electric power consumption and producing electricity in more eco-friendly way is a key to reduce carbon dioxide emissions and their impact on our environment and global warming. More importantly weather behaviour to a large extent has become unpredictable. The sea-level is also increasing alarmingly because due to global warming the arctic glaciers are melting as never before. Leaders of all countries are very much worried and keen to stop the accumulation of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.
They are of the opinion that global emissions of greenhouse gases would have to stop growing to curb the menace of greenhouse effect.
Green I.T Advantages The following are some of the advantages of green I.T:
1. Enterprises with the technology and vision to produce products and services that address environmental issues enjoy a competitive edge because many customers when making purchasing, leasing, or outsourcing decisions, have started to consider the service providers environmental records and initiatives.
2. Organizations face lower energy costs and even save a lot on government taxes when they follow government policies on environment and produce goods following strict environment norms. 3. Investors and consumers are beginning to demand more disclosures from companies with regard to their carbon footprint as well as their environmental initiatives and achievements, and they have started discounting share prices of companies that poorly address the environmental problems they create. As a result of which, many businesses have begun showing their environmental credentials. For instance, the Carbon Disclosure Project is a recent initiative to request global companies to disclose their carbon emissions.
C. Adoption Of Green Computing The following factors are impacting data centers as well as desktop computers, though to a lesser degree, and driving the need to adopt green computing practices:
I) Rapid Growth Of The Internet: More and more people are increasingly relying on electronic data. There has been a rapid adoption of internet communications and media, computerization of business processes and applications, legal requirements for record retentions and disaster recovery. All these have led to the rapid growth in the size and number of data centers. On an individual level video and music downloads, on-line gaming, social networking site visits and VoIP are key drivers. Industry is also using internet increasingly. Internet usage is growing at more than 10 percent annually leading to an estimated 20% CAGR in data center demand.Disaster recovery strategies that emphasises on maintaining duplicate records increases demand further. Many federal, state, and local government agencies have adopted e-government strategies that utilize the Web for public information, reporting, transactions, homeland security, and scientific computing.
II) Increasing Equipment Power Density: Although advances in server CPUs have in some cases enabled higher performance with less power consumption per CPU, overall server power consumption has continued to increase as more servers are installed with higher performance power-hungry processors with more memory capacity. As more servers are installed they require more floor space. To pack more servers in the same footprint the form factor of servers has become much smaller, in some cases shrinking by more than 70% through the use of blade servers. This increase in packaging density has been matched by a major increase in the power density of data centers. Density has increased more than ten times from 300 watts per square foot in 1996 to over 4,000 watts per square foot in 2007, a trend that is expected to continue its upward spiral.
III) Increasing Cooling Requirements: The increase in server power density has led to a associated increase in data center heat density. Servers require approximately 1 to 1.5 watts of cooling for each watt of power used. The ratio of cooling power to server power requirements will continue to increase as data center server densities increase.
IV) Increasing Energy Costs: Data center expenditures for power and cooling can exceed that for equipment over the useful life of a server. One study estimated that for a typical $4,000 server rated at 500 watts, it would consume approximately $4,000 of electricity for power and cooling over three years, at $0.08 per kilowatt-hour, and double that in Japan [15]. The ratio of power and cooling expense to equipment expenses have increased from approximately 0.1 to 1 in 2000 to 1 to 1 in 2007. With the likely increase in the number of data centers and servers and the advent of a carbon cap-and-trade scheme, the cost of energy for data center power and cooling will increase continuously.
V) Restrictions On Energy Supply And Access: Companies such as Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo with the need for large data centers may not be able to find power at any price in major American cities. Therefore, they have built new data centers in the Pacific Northwest near the Columbia River where they have direct access to low-cost hydroelectric power and this has proved beneficial to them because they do not depend on the overtaxed electrical grid. In states such as, California, Illinois, and New York, the old electrical infrastructure and high costs of power can stall or stop the construction of new data centers and limit the operations of existing centers. In some crowded urban areas utility power feeds are at capacity and electricity is not available for new data centers at any price.
VI) Low Server Utilization Rates: Data center efficiency is a major problem in terms of energy use. The server utilization rates average 5-10 per cent for large data centers. Low server utilization means companies are overpaying for energy, maintenance, operations support, while only using a small percentage of computing capacity.
VII) D. Eco Friendly Practices Below some environment friendly approaches are discussed:
I) End User: Most personal desktop computers run even when they aren being used, wasting enormous amount of electricity. Users should not leave them on unnecessarily. Computers generate heat and require cooling, which adds to the total power consumption and cost for the enterprise. While the savings in energy costs per PC may not seem like much, the collective savings for hundreds of computers in an enterprise is considerably high. If proper eco-friendly measures are followed an enterprise may save lot of money and consequently have an increased profit margin. Such an enterprise will have a competitive edge as compared to its competitors.
PC energy consumption can be reduced by adopting several excellent measures as given below:
a. Enabling power management features: Without sacrificing performance, computers can be programmed to automatically power down to an energy-saving state when idle. The US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) estimated that providing computers with a sleep mode reduces their energy use by 60,70 percent. Because PCs are widely used across any given organization, it is very difficult for the IT staff of any organization to manage their organizationâs PC power consumption prudently. In this case, a pragmatic approach is to use software such as Surveyor from Verdiem that offers network-level control over PCs and monitors. The software places the PC into a lower-power consumption mode, such as shutdown, hibernation, or standby, and monitors into a sleep mode when they are idle. Besides, it also measures and reports how much power each PC and monitor consumes. Network managers can remotely awake the PCs for software upgrades, maintenance, or backup.
b. Using thin client computer: Users can choose to deploy thinclient computers which draw about a fifth of the power of a desktop PC.
c. Using screensavers: A blank screensaver conserves more power than a screensaver that displays moving images, which continually interacts with the CPU. But even that reduces the monitors energy expenditure by only a small percentage.
The end user may also follow the following tips for reducing energy consumption:
a. Printing: Printing should be done prudently and only those pages should be printed that are absolutely indispensable. Apart from electricity this will save lot of paper and consequently lower cutting down of trees.
b. Refilling: Refilling of ink cartridges and laser toners are cheaper and does not add to landfill. Hence should be carried out.
c. Switching off:
I.T hardware devices should be turned off when not in use. II) Old Computer: Old unwanted computers and monitors shouldn’t be thrown away in rubbish bins, as they will then end up in landfills causing serious environmental problems. Instead, they should be refurbished and reused or recycled in environmentally sound ways. Otherwise this will result in irreparable damage to the environment.
Below is a brief outline of the methods that can be followed to achieve the goal:
a. Reuse: An old computer should continue to be used if it meets the user requirements. Otherwise, it can be given to someone who needs it or the functional components may be used from a retired product. By using the hardware for a longer period of time, the total environmental footprint caused by computer manufacturing and disposal will be reduced greatly. b. Refurbish: Old computers and servers can be refurbished to meet new requirements. An old computer and other IT hardware can be made almost new again by reconditioning and replacing their parts. Rather than buying a new computer, refurbished IT hardware can be bought from the market. Nowadays, more enterprises are open to purchasing refurbished goods, and the market for refurbished IT equipment is growing. From the green angle, reusing is a better long-term way of managing resources. Financially speaking, it is more sensible as outward cash flow and capital expenditures are reduced. If these options are unsuitable, the outdated equipments can be donated to charities or schools or computers can be traded. Charities refurbish old computers and give them to those in need.
c. Recycle: When computers cannot be reused, even after considering the prospects of refurbishing, they must be disposed properly in environmentally friendly ways. Vast majority of unwanted computers and electronic goods end up in landfills. Electronic waste or e-waste—is one of the fastest-growing waste types, and the problem of e-waste is a global threat. Analysts predict that two-thirds of the estimated 870 million PCs made worldwide in the next five years will end up in landfills. The United Nations Environment Program estimates that 20 to 50 million tons of e-waste are generated worldwide each year, and this is increasing at an alarming rate.
Apart from containing toxic materials like lead, chromium, cadmium, and mercury, computer components contain many other harmful materials. If computers are buried in landfills, harmful chemicals from them may leak into waterways and the environment. If burned, they release toxic gases into the air we breathe, so if e-waste is not discarded properly, it will be harmful to the environment and people. On the other hand, e-waste can be a valuable source for secondary raw materials. Old electronic systems should be recycled by taking component material and reprocessing it into the same material or breaking it down into constituent materials for reuse.
G. Industry Associations Below is given a brief outline of some of the industry associations related to green computing:
I) Green Grid: The Green Grid is a voluntary international non-profit organization, the main purpose of which is to develop standards to measure data center efficiency including both the facilities and the equipment inside. Member companies share information about processes and technologies that can help data centers improve performance against those metrics. Board members include Intel, IBM, Microsoft, AMD, HP, Dell, EMC, APC, and Sun.
II) The Climate Savers Computing Initiative: Climate Savers Computing Initiative member companies commit to purchasing energy-efficient desktops and servers, and to broadly deploying power management strategies. By openly declaring their support for this effort, companies express their commitment to the greening of IT and join other industry-leading companies and organizations in corporate social responsibility and sustainable IT. Board members are CSC, Dell, Google, HP, Intel, Lenovo, Microsoft, and the World Wildlife Fund.
II) The Uptime Institute: The Uptime Institute Inc. provides educational and consulting services for organizations interested in maximizing data center uptime and sustainable IT. The Institute has pioneered industry standards which rate data center availability. The Uptime Network has 100 mostly Fortune 100 sized members. The Institute promotes learning among its members and provides conferences, site tours, benchmarking, best practices, and abnormal incident collection and analysis. Apart from these, it also certifies data center tier levels and site resiliency.
CONCLUSION
can be observed that green computing is the need of the hour to protect the environment. As more and more time passes the need of computers as a dependable machine increases and so does its use. So computer penetration is increasing globally at an amazing rate. This makes it all the more necessary to maintain green computing procedures throughout the life cycle of a computer from manufacturing through day-to-day operation till the end of its operating stage. In this regard according to David Wang, the data center architecture of Teradata, are Every step consumes energy and buying a new, more efficient computer may not always be the right answer. Thus, it can be safely concluded that in order to have a healthy and clean environment all stake holders must work collaboratively for a healthier and greener environment for our future generations.
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