DOE Promoting Energy Efficiency in the Information Economy

DOE Promoting Energy Efficiency in the Information Economy

The Department of Energy is awarding $47 million to support the development of new technologies and knowhow aimed at improving energy efficiency in the information technology (IT) and communication technology sectors. Energy Secretary Steven Chu announced that 14 projects across the country will share in this award. Information technology and telecommunications are vital and rapidly growing sectors of our overall economy and will become even more central as the smart grid is deployed. As our country increasingly comes to rely on an information economy in sector after sector the underlying physical infrastructure that supports it, such as the data centers, networks, routers and so forth, is expected to continue to rapidly grow.

The Way of the Green Code

This is an article devoted to the idea that a revolution in software design is needed in order to produce software –or as insiders often refer to it: the code – that is both greener itself and that is designed to help other systems and products become greener… i.e. more energy and resource efficient, less wasteful, more adaptive to current conditions.

There are two often intertwined paths to follow, both of which are important for this discussion. Code itself needs to become greener; using virtual resources more efficiently and thus using fewer hardware resources and less power to accomplish the same computing tasks. Code should also be designed with a feature set that enables other products, running the code, to use less energy and to be able to time shift their energy requirements to off peak periods.