GREEN COMPUTINGSeminar Presented by- Dipankar Mazumdar

What is GREEN COMPUTING?

Green Computing is the practice of using computer resources efficiently.

Designing, manufacturing, disposing computers, servers with no impact on the environment.

To reduce the use of hazardous materials, thus maximizing energy efficiency during product’s lifetime.

Also known as Green IT.

Why GREEN COMPUTING?

Computer Energy is often wasteful.

Eg: Leaving the Computer ON when not in use.

Printing is wasteful.

Eg: Email / Meeting agenda’s print-outs is a waste.

Pollution.

Eg: Due to manufacturing, packaging, disposal techniques.

Toxicity.

Eg: Due to toxic chemicals involved in manufacturing.

Green Manufacturing-

Bamboo: is becoming increasingly popular for making casings for computers & peripherals.

Recyclable plastics: Computers are constructed from recyclable polycarbonate resin.

Eco-friendly flame retardant: There are flame retardant silicone compounds available that are flame retardant and completely non-toxic.

Inventory Management: reducing the quantity of both hazardous materials used in the process and the amount of excess raw materials.

Volume reduction: removes hazardous portion of waste from non-hazardous portion.

Energy use of PC:

CPU uses 120 watts.

CRT uses 150 watts.

-8 hours of usage, 5 days a week = 562 KWatts.

Energy use basically comes from-

-Electrical current to run the CPU, Motherboard, Memory

-Running the fan & spinning the disk.

-Monitor.

Energy Star One of the first manifestations of the Green Computing movement

was the launch of ‘Energy Star’ program back in 1992.

Energy Star served as a voluntary label awarded to computing products that succeeded in minimizing use of energy while maximizing the efficiency.

Energy Star applied to products like Monitors, television sets and temperature control devices like refrigerators, air-conditioners.

Pathways to Green Computing:

Following are the pathways to Green Computing:

Green Use.

Green Disposal.

Green Design.

Green Manufacturing.

Approaches:

Product longevity: the biggest contribution to green computing usually is to prolong the equipment's lifetime. Recently, ‘Fujitsu’ released a Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) of a desktop that shows that manufacturing and end of life accounts for the majority of the laptop ecological footprint.

Software and deployment optimization:

- The efficiency of algorithms has an impact on the amount of computer resources required for any given computing function.

- Algorithm changes, such as switching from a slow (e.g. linear) search algorithm to a fast (e.g. hashed or indexed) search algorithm can reduce resource usage for a given task from substantial to zero.

Approaches: contd..

Power management.

Recycling.

Saving Energy while working in Computer:

Sleep Mode:

Sleep or Stand-by mode conserves energy by cutting off power to our display, hard drives and peripherals.

After a preset period of inactivity, our computer switches to a low power state.

Hibernate Mode:

Saves energy and protects our work by copying system data to a reserved area on our hard drive and then completely turning off computer.

Saving Energy while working in Internet:

‘Blackle’ is a website powered by Google custom search and created by ‘Heap Media’ which aims to save energy by displaying a black background and using grayish-white font color for search results.

‘Blackle’ saves energy because the screen is predominantly black.

Setting ‘Blackle’ as the default search engine will definitely take us to Green computing.

Green Disposal:

Reuse: donate your computer components to people who don’t have or have lesser quality computers.

Refurbish: rather than discarding your computer upgrade it. Change its parts to make it new.

Recycle: One of the major challenges is recycling the printed circuit boards from electronic wastes. The circuit board contains such precious metals as gold, silver, platinum etc.

Compute Green!

Thank you!