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Will wind farms wed server farms?
Computing should be moved from desktops and server farms to areas of abundant renewable energy such as solar and wind, Cambridge University's Professor Andy Hopper suggested yesterday. The Guardian quotes him as pointing out that computing is special in that processing can be done anywhere.
UK computing apparently accounts for 2.8m tons of carbon emissions a year, just under 2 percent of the national total. Fifteen percent of this is down to desktop computers.
The downside of concentrating it into relatively small areas is that data storage and processing could be vulnerable to catastrophic physical attack. Distributed data and processing, and indeed distributed harvesting of renewable energy, would surely be more resilient.
This is not to dismiss Hopper's idea. It would prevent the not inconsiderable losses involved in trunking energy across the country, it could provide work in low-employment areas, and it could make renewable energy generation viable on, for instance, islands where the cost of building and maintaining power transmission lines would otherwise prohibit it.
It might also lead a reversion to the days before electrical power, when industries tended to cluster around energy sources in the form of fuel or renewables like water.
Posted by Clive Akass on March 18, 2008 | Permalink
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