Ottawa, Canada — Four projects aimed at greening the information and communications technology (ICT) industry in Canada are receiving a $2.4 million boost from Canada's Advanced Research and Innovation Network (CANARIE).
The largest chunk of CANARIE's funding, $2 million, will go to the GreenStar Network for developing the first internet network with network nodes powered completely by wind and solar energy. The GreenStar Network is an alliance of Canadian IT companies, universities and international partners.
CANARIE is also giving $163,000 to a project by McGill University and University of California-San Diego to design an ultra-efficient data center for high-performance computing applications.
The University of British Columbia's Centre for Sustainability and Social Innovation at Sauder School of Business will receive $119,000 to develop a business case for how carbon offsets can be used to finance data center relocations and how universities could implement this strategy.
Lastly, $100,000 will go to the International Institute for Sustainable Development to conduct a study to assess the business case and carbon-offset potential for Canadian universities to use CANARIE's ultra high-speed network to run IT operations from remote data center facilities that would be carbon-free.
CANARIE manages network hundreds of times faster than the Internet used by researchers around the world to share and analyze massive amounts of data.
Data center - http://www.flickr.com/photos/clonedmilkmen/ / CC BY-SA 2.0