A couple of years ago the US Environmental Protection Agency reported that the energy consumption associated with data centers had doubled between 2000 and 2006, reaching some 60 billion kWh in 2006, roughly 1.5 per cent of the entire US energy use. The EPA says this is expected to double again by 2010.
The report triggered a flurry of interest in ways to reduce consumption. However, Stavros Harizopoulos from HP Labs in Palo Alto and buddies say that almost all the attention has focused on hardware fixes. At the chip level, this means things like dynamic voltage and frequency scaling (DVFS), clock routing optimizations, low-power logic and asymmetric multi-cores. At the platform level they've suggested things like dynamically turning off DRAM, disk speed control and disk spin down.
But what of software fixes? Harizopoulos and co say far less work has been done in this area, partly because there are limited ways in which programmers can control the power hungry process that go on in silico.
