Sun plans for Energy Efficient Servers

With energy efficiency and environmental issues of growing concern, Sun is preparing to tune its servers to be more environmentally friendly by introducing power management capabilities.

Sun plans to introduce the notion of power-managed states, in which future servers will respond to a user's internal energy policies. For example, a 1 kilowatt server might be tuned to run at only 500 watts, and the server figures out how to run under that constraint, Bapat said.

Power management also will be offered for memory components, chips, disk drives, and fans via intelligent firmware that will calibrate power. There will be states like idle and sleep states.

Other suggestions include running datacenters at off-peak hours for activities such as batch jobs and even siphoning off the cheaper nighttime megawatts during the night to freeze water. During the day, air conditioning use is cut by running the hot air off the ice.

County Aims For Energy Efficiency

Schenectady County officials recently announced initiatives aimed at improving energy conservation and efficiency.

The county will give preference to Energy Star products when buying for county facilities. Energy Star, which is managed by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the U.S. Department of Energy, is a voluntary labeling program from appliance manufacturers designed to help consumers identify products that are energy-efficient.

IBM Introduces New Energy Efficient Supercomputer

IBM has introduced a new supercomputer powered by one of the world's fastest microprocessors and cooled by an innovative water system.

The new Power 575 supercomputer, equipped with IBM's latest POWER6 microprocessor, uses water-chilled copper plates located above each microprocessor to remove heat from the electronics.

Requiring 80 percent fewer air conditioning units, the water-cooled Power 575 can reduce typical energy consumption used to cool the data center by 40 percent. IBM scientists estimate that water can be up to 4,000-times more effective in cooling computer systems than air.

Climate Change Affecting Human Health

WHO Director General Dr Margaret Chan said yesterday, World Health Day, that climate change was already affecting human health and was giving "a glimpse of the challenges public health will have to confront on a large scale".

Many human diseases are climate sensitive, and warming up the Earth will increase the numbers of people exposed to diseases that today kill millions. These include malnutrition (kills over 3.5 million people a year), diarrhoeal diseases (kill over 1.8 million), and malaria (kills nearly 1 million).

Expert:: Climate change can increase risk of cataract blindness

According to an expert, climate change will increase the risk of people losing their sight through cataracts because of higher levels of ultraviolet rays.

Andreas Mueller of the Fred Hollows Foundation went on to say:

The three main risk factors that lead to cataract blindness are age, smoking and UV exposure, in that order.

Climate change will increase UV levels and therefore increase the risk of developing cataracts.

A spokesman for the foundation, which works mostly in developing countries to restore sight to people with cataracts, said the increased exposure to ultraviolet rays would be caused by depletion of the ozone layer.

San Leandro to tackle Energy Efficiency

In the next few months, the Energy Watch program of the Association of Bay Area Governments will be working with PG&E to make energy-hogging city buildings more fuel-efficient. Energy Watch is funded by the California Public Utilities Commission to provide incentives to local governments looking to reduce energy consumption.

San Leandro now joins the more than 35 Bay Area governments that participate in Energy Watch. Whenever a city or agency signs on, Energy Watch covers three-quarters of the related costs — provided the plans for the new member city align with Energy Watch's budget, officials said.

San Leandro staff have been working with a consultancy called Energy Solutions to survey the city's en-ergy use and analyze how the city can improve its buildings. The consultancy has now developed an energy action plan to help the city implement some of those measures.