A breakthrough by researchers at the University of Sydney is set to harmonise two of today’s hottest emerging trends: cloud computing and energy efficiency.
Dr Young Choon Lee and Professor Albert Zomaya, from the university’s Centre for Distributed and High Performance Computing, have patented their Energy Conscious Scheduling (ECS) algorithm – a mathematical model that can more than halve the energy consumption of processors in data centres at little or no operational cost.
It is estimated that power consumption by global data servers in 2005 cost $US7.2 billion. With the growth of web-based data storage (commonly known as could computing), this cost is growing exponentially. The ECS offers companies the dual benefit of being able to reduce their IT costs and their carbon footprint.
Lee and Zomaya are currently developing an ECS prototype and expect that it will be ready for commercialisation in 2011.
