Building Green Software

Chapter 4. Operational Efficiency

Resistance is futile!

The Borg

In reality, resistance isn’t futile. It’s much worse than that.

The Battle Against the Machines

One day, superconducting servers running in supercool(ed) data centers will eliminate resistance, and our DCs will operate on a fraction of the electricity they do now. Perhaps our future artificial general intelligence (AGI) overlords are already working on that. Unfortunately, however, we puny humans can’t wait.

Today, as we power machines in data centers, they heat up. That energy—too often generated at significant climate cost—is then lost forever. Battling resistance is what folks are doing when they work to improve power usage effectiveness (PUE) in DCs (as we discussed in Chapter 2). It is also the motive behind the concept of operational efficiency, which is what we are going to talk about in this chapter.

Note

Those superconducting DCs might be in space because that could solve the cold issue (superconductors need to be very, very cold—space cold, not pop-on-a-vest cold). Off-planet superconducting DCs are a century off, though. Too late to solve our immediate problems.

For the past three decades, we have fought the waste of electricity in DCs using developments in CPU design and other improvements in hardware efficiency. These have allowed developers to achieve the same functional output with progressively fewer and fewer machines and less power. Those Moore’s law upgrades, however, are no longer enough for ...