IBM Hosts 5th Annual Conference on Energy Efficient Design

IBM (NYSE: IBM) will today host its fifth annual Conference on Energy Efficient Design in Austin. The forum brings industry, government and academic leaders together with IBM researchers and developers from around the world to discuss new approaches to chip and systems design to drive breakthroughs in power management and energy-efficient computing.

Special guest, Andrew Fanara, from the U.S. EPA, is on hand to discuss the ENERGY STAR® Program, intended to help businesses and individuals protect the environment by identifying products with superior energy efficiency and savings. Additional presentations from IBM, Intel, Texas Instruments, Pennsylvania State University and the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, explore innovations in energy efficient, reliable chip and systems design, systems power management, and power management technology for portable devices.

IBM has led the technology industry in energy-smart innovation for over forty years, which has led to radical breakthroughs in mainframe cooling efficiency to the development of the world’s most powerful computer in Blue Gene that delivers the most performance per kilowatt of power consumed. The Austin Conference on Energy Efficient Design was started by IBM’s Austin Research Lab in 2002, to further enable development of technologies and solutions for energy-efficient computing.

Dr. Tom W. Keller, IBM Research lead for system-level power efficiency and management technologies has played an integral role in the conference since its inception: “IBM’s broad expertise in technical research and innovation continues to guide leadership design in processors, systems and management software to help clients better optimize energy consumption in the datacenter. By collaborating with industry thought leaders, IBM continues to drive discussion and development of energy-smart innovations to help businesses reduce the environmental impact of technology operations.”

Dr. Keller and his team at the Austin Research Laboratory have secured 45 patents and patent filings since 2002 in the areas of power/performance optimization and energy-efficient designs for computers.

Environmental Agency Collaborates with IBM to Design Energy Efficient Data Center

As IBM continues to innovate and collaborate on energy-smart computing design, clients of all sizes, in all industries, continue to benefit.

Sustainability Victoria is a state government agency in Australia that provides information and advice to business, government and the community about using resources more efficiently and reducing everyday environmental impacts. The organization practices what it preaches through a comprehensive environment management system which includes constantly reviewing and improving its own environmental performance.

The organization recently consolidated its operations from three separate offices to one centralized location in October 2006. The move provided the agency with a chance to create a model office for energy efficient technology usage. For example, it replaced almost all its desktop computers and CRT monitors with laptops and LCD screens, which consume much less power. Sustainability Victoria also opted to use IBM technology in its data center to reduce its energy consumption by more than 50 percent.

“Taking into account computers, printers, faxes, phone systems and servers, IT consumes up to 75 percent of the electricity in the average office. The server room alone accounts for around 60 percent of this,” said Geoff Mabbett, chief executive of Sustainability Victoria. “By reducing the number of servers, using more energy efficient technology and intelligently managing server usage, we expect to reduce our data center power consumption by more than 50 percent.”

Sustainability Victoria collaborated with IBM to deploy IBM BladeCenter servers, designed with up to 90 percent energy efficient power supplies able to reach peak efficiency even under small load; and IBM Calibrated Vector Cooling technology to allow dual paths of air to each component to improve uptime and longevity while also reducing wasteful air movement. Sustainability Victoria also re-evaluated traditional wisdom that all servers need to run 24 hours a day. With IBM PowerExecutive, the organization will have the ability to monitor actual power consumption by its systems and accurately reduce power consumption of non-critical servers at nights and on weekends.