President-elect Obama's choice of Nobel award-winning physicist and head of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory Steven Chu is good news for green IT. Dr. Chu has already launched a project at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory that could drastically reduce the energy needs of supercomputers. You can expect more green IT breakthoughs from him as well.
The Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory needed to build a massive supercomputer to create a sophisticated model of climate change. The problem: Based on the computing power they needed, building a supercomputing using existing technology would consume an astonishing 200 megawatts of electricity, enough to power a city of 100,000. The supercomputer would have to be more than 1,000 times as powerful as today's supercomputers.
Instead, the lab partnered with a company called Tenscilica to design a supercomputer that is made up of tens of thousands of specialized, embedded processors. Building the supercomputer this way is expected to cut the energy consumption of the supercomputer down to four megawatts, which is a mere two percent of what have been required by a traditional supercomputer.
(For more details, see
Berkeley Lab, Tensilica Collaborate on Energy-Efficient Climate-Modeling Supercomputer from GreenerComputing.)
As the country's energy chief, Dr. Chu will be able to launch many more projects like this, many of them directed at Green IT. In addition, as a long-time advocate of a scientific solution to climate change, he recognizes the vital role IT plays in solving today's complex environmental problems. That means more research money, and ultimately good news for Green IT.
The contrast between Dr. Chu and the current energy czar, Samuel W. Bodman, could not be any greater. True, Bodman has a technical background, with a degree in chemical engineering from Cornell University, and a Doctor of Science (ScD) degree from MIT. But he became a financier rather than a scientist, spending his life before becoming energy chief as a venture capitalist and financier with firms including Fidelity Investments.
Financiers, more often than not, look to cut IT because they view it as an expense; scientists look to IT as a key tool to solving problems. So expect a focused research effort aimed at Green IT in the new administration.
