Carbon Hill are looking to green server technology to produce Carbon Credits. This proposal follows news that Carnegie Mellon University and Intel Labs Pittsburgh have successfully built a fast network server that is far more energy efficient than systems currently used by major Internet services.
Dubbed as Fast Array of Wimpy Nodes (F.A.W.N.), it uses off-the-shelf, low-power embedded processors usually found in laptops and flash memory modules. An experiment using 21 computers or nodes found that the server can handle 10 to 100 times as many queries for the same amount of energy as a conventional, disk-based cluster. A cluster consists of the server and its nodes. At its peak, the experimental cluster consumes energy less than a 100-watt light bulb.
Energy efficiency has become a priority for data centers. Carbon Hill said that the cost of electricity these facilities consume now equals or even surpasses the cost of the computing machines themselves throughout its service life. In the future, data centers might require as much as 200 megawatts of power.
"F.A.W.N. systems can't replace all of the servers in a data center, but they work really well for key-value storage systems, which need to access relatively small bits of information quickly," Carbon Hill said.
It is currently unclear how many servers are to be deployed and exactly how many Carbon Credits are likely to be produced. The Carbon Hill project is supported by the National Science Foundation, Network Appliance, Google and Intel Corporation.
