Green cyberinfrastructure cooperation Canada-USA-Australia

In one of the first efforts of its kind, universities in Canada and California are pledging to work together to reduce GHG emissions on their campuses while developing a 'green cyberinfrastructure' – information technology that improves energy efficiency and reduces the impact of emissions on climate change.

The institutions have agreed to develop methods to share GHG emission data in connection with International Organization for Standardization (ISO) standards for information computer and telecommunications equipment (ISO 14062), as well as baseline emission data for cyberinfrastructure and networks (ISO 14064). These protocols will become much more widely used as those reducing ICT GHG emissions wish to obtain energy credits in “cap and trade” systems. The California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology (Calit2) GreenLight data center will be connected to Canadian end users over the CENIC/Pacific Wave/CANARIE dedicated optical fiber networks. CANARIE in Canada is studying establishing several research data centers near hydro, wind, and solar powered energy sources, so that a variety of Green Cloud alternatives can be experimented with. Meanwhile, efforts are underway at Calit2 to use DC fuel cell technologies to experiment with feeding modular data centers locally with zero carbon emission energy sources.

With Australia, Calit2 will build on its now extensive relations with Australian universities, CSIRO, and AARNet to extend in 2009 the UCSD/Canadian Green IT test bed to sites in Australia. Approximately half of the energy consumed by the Internet goes into the core network routers in the core nodes. Therefore, large improvements in network energy efficiency can be obtained if each packet travelling through the Internet passes through as few routers as possible. The primary method to minimize router hops is to employ optical bypass, by which traffic is groomed into wavelengths and/or wavebands which can be diverted around certain routers, avoiding the need for full electronic processing and every router. CUBIN proposes to study this using the dedicated optical infrastructure made available by the AARNet/CENIC testbed.

A presentation and paper by Larry Smarr was given at a recent Australia-USA leadership event.

http://www.calit2.net/newsroom/presentations/lsmarr/2008/ppt/AALD_ICT_and_Climate_011509.ppt