Hardware and software as a threat

Dusseldorf It doesn’t matter how the gas and oil crisis goes: as long as the mainframes in Frankfurt are running, the residents of Westville will be cozy and warm. Because water is supposed to run through their heating pipes to heat the servers of a data center – free of charge. According to the plan, 60 percent of the energy requirements in the new district should be covered with waste heat.

With the pilot project, the IT company Telehouse Deutschland and the energy supplier Mainova are also tackling an increasingly pressing problem: the aim is to avert the dramatic climate impacts of digitization.

“Digitization can quickly become a climate problem,” says Christoph Meinel, Director of the Hasso Plattner Institute (HPI) in Potsdam. Although the technology has a positive effect on protecting the environment and the climate, the CO2 emissions of digitization itself are already twice as high as those of global air traffic.

The digital currency Bitcoin alone requires as much electricity as all of Belgium consumes. The professor of Internet technologies fears damage to his image: “I’m really worried that digitization shame will arise in the discussion” – and one day its use could be as frowned upon as air travel.

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The same applies to digital technology as to plastic: Thoughtless use is a danger to the world, but doing without it would cost prosperity and prevent innovation and also damage climate protection.

Meinel and some colleagues at the HPI are working on making digital technologies as climate-friendly as possible. The “Clean IT Forum” is intended to promote the exchange between research, politics and the IT industry on sustainable digitization. “We have to think about sustainability from the outset, just like security and data protection,” says Meinel. The digital infrastructure itself should be as sustainable as possible from the start. He calls it: “Sustainability by Design”.

The optimization potential is immense – from the development of the hardware to the programming of the software to the double use of energy in the data centers. Where the industry is already rethinking and what still needs to be done.

Hardware: disassemble, reuse, resell

The first and most obvious climate problem of the IT industry lies in the hardware. The following applies to the smartphone in your pocket as well as to the server farms in Frankfurt data centers: A considerable part of the emissions already occurs during production.

According to an estimate by the Öko-Institut in Freiburg, a laptop alone produces 250 kilograms of CO2, and a smartphone 100 kilograms. According to the independent organization, a particularly large amount of energy is required for the extraction of raw materials and the manufacture of semiconductors.

Smartphone factory in India

A lot of CO2 is already generated during hardware production.

(Photo: Bloomberg via Getty Images)

For servers, the manufacturing process accounts for 60 to 80 percent of the carbon footprint over the entire life cycle, OVH Cloud estimates. That is why the cloud and hosting provider has introduced a circular economy. What helps: The company constructs the hardware itself and therefore knows it well.

If server components such as processors and memory, hard drives and power supplies are still usable, they are returned to inventory or resold. According to OVH, the average service life of a server is seven years. Three to four are common in the industry. And defective parts are recycled by “ecologically certified service providers”.

With OVH Cloud, online services are offered under their own name with up-to-date hardware. Services with older and less powerful components are marketed under their own brands such as Rise, So You Start and Kimsufi. These are aimed at companies that, for example, have servers with less computing power.

But one thing is also certain: many companies and private users will not make any compromises when it comes to the performance of their computers. And in view of digitization, the demand for servers is even growing. If IT wants to reduce its ecological footprint, it must therefore rely on climate-friendly programming.

Software: programmed to be climate-friendly – ​​like the rover on Mars

“Software is eating the world,” wrote the US venture capitalist Marc Andreessen back in 2011. He is convinced that digital technology will revolutionize practically every business. Ten years later, there is no longer any doubt: Today, IT is crucial to how cars and elevators work, how production and customer service are organized.

If every company is a software manufacturer, this also means that more and more program code is being created – and the energy requirements of the software are increasing as a result. Algorithms with artificial intelligence are particularly energy-hungry. According to experts, the training of a large model like GPT-3 corresponds to 300 flights from New York to San Francisco and back. The algorithm – a climate killer.

Even the smallest improvements can therefore have a huge impact: “Especially with applications that are used a lot, you have a lot of leverage,” says Henning Heitkötter, who has a leading position in cloud development at SAP.

The manager does the math: if a developer ensures that a program uses the processor one second less, it only saves ten watt-seconds of energy each time. However, if 1.5 million users call up this function 20 times a day, the savings add up to 19 megawatt hours (MWh) per year.

And he continues to calculate: With 5,000 improvements of this type, the total would already be 9.5 gigawatt hours, i.e. “the energy consumption of a small town”. For a company like SAP, that’s “a realistic number,” says the manager: The software manufacturer has more than 240 million cloud users across all applications.

The parameters for saving energy are manifold, sometimes even banal: for example, if companies do not send invoices in PDF format but simply email the text or a link, this becomes noticeable. And even if programmers store certain data in a cache instead of recalculating them each time, consumption drops.

server room

Even small improvements in programs can save a lot of energy overall.

(Photo: imago/photothek)

One company that has already started to rethink is the Otto Group Solution Provider (OSP), an IT service provider for the retail group of the same name. Developer Tobias Gerbothe observes that his guild has hardly given any thought to computing power over the past few years. “Unlike in the past, there are practically unlimited resources available today,” says the OSP developer. If a program requires more computing power than expected, you can simply book additional capacities in the cloud.

In his opinion, a role model for energy-saving programming is currently rolling across Mars: The rover “Perseverance” only has a 200 megahertz processor and two gigabytes of main memory in its on-board computer. This is comparable to a PC in the mid-1990s. He uses it to control navigation as well as numerous instruments designed to explore the nature of the red planet.

Gerbothe is involved with colleagues at OSP in the “Sustainable Programming Initiative”. Obtaining green electricity and offsetting emissions is one thing. “But we want to become more energy-efficient, that has to come from the machine room,” he says. A team has therefore developed a strategy as to how software can be as sustainable as possible – from planning to implementation to operation.

>> Read also: These building materials swallow CO2: How the construction industry could go green

Such a change is not easy. On the one hand, standards that programmers can use as a guide are still rare. OSP uses a specification from the Green Software Foundation, the first version of which was published last year. An employee training course is currently being developed.

On the other hand, users also need to rethink: “There are conflicting goals that can never be completely resolved,” says OSP boss Stefan Borsutzky, who is helping to shape the project. When programming has to be done quickly – which is often the case – efficiency suffers. It is therefore necessary to keep a permanent discussion about it going. “We see an analogy with IT security: you’re never done with it.”

Data centers: Storage space for some, fan heaters for others

For the foreseeable future, the power requirements for data centers will continue to increase. “Despite the significant gains in efficiency in data center IT and in the infrastructure components of the data centers, a further increase in energy demand can be expected in the future,” wrote the Borderstep Institute 2021 in a report with reference to Germany. It’s the same elsewhere.

This is why projects like the Westville residential area in Frankfurt are important. The double use of energy – first in the form of electricity to operate servers, then in the form of waste heat for heating water and living space – promises high efficiency. In addition to real estate developers, numerous IT companies are also following the pilot project closely.

The construction work for the new heating system is currently underway. Pipes are needed to connect the new living quarters with the data center, as well as a station with buffer storage and heat pumps that further heat the waste heat from the data center from 30 to 70 degrees – otherwise the heating will not work properly.

Other projects of this kind are likely to follow, especially in the Main metropolis. Due to the proximity to the large internet node De-Cix, more than 60 such data factories are in operation there. There is competition among Internet companies, software manufacturers and data center operators to improve efficiency. After all, the electricity bill is one of the biggest costs – even if renewable energy is used.

>>Read also: The battery cell of the future should charge faster and store more energy – thanks to silicon

The Federal Environment Agency could also become a driver in this matter. There is no transparency about the energy efficiency of data centers, complained its president Dirk Messer at a conference in March. There are also no methods to measure the consumption of algorithms and software uniformly. The authority is now developing a rating system.

Companies are particularly concerned with cooling. A server cabinet with graphics cards, often used in applications with artificial intelligence, consumes several kilowatts of electricity, says Jens Struckmeier, co-founder and head of technology at Cloud & Heat Technologies, a Dresden-based provider of data center technology. “A rack produces as much heat as several fan heaters. It is becoming increasingly expensive and time-consuming to cool the new systems.”

Despite advances in cooling technology, you are now reaching your limits. The physicist’s credo: “There is no good plan on how we can further reduce the power consumption of data centers – then we should at least make use of the heat.”

Cloud & Heat turned it into a business model. The technology company develops systems in which servers are cooled with water, which then flows into heating systems. “At the beginning I underestimated how complex it is,” says Struckmeier: “In the next few years it will be important to implement this concept across the board.”

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