Delaying data could cut net's power usage
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Date posted: 07/05/2008
Posted by: Site Administration
This story is from the category
 Computing Power

As energy prices soar, and governments and organisations start to sweat over their carbon footprint, the energy consumption of the internet (over 2% of all human activity and growing) is coming under scrutiny.

Sergiu Nedevschi of the University of California in Berkeley, US, and colleagues at Intel Research labs in Berkeley and Seattle, have worked out how to make energy savings of around 50%, by delaying data flowing into a network by just a few milliseconds.

That is long enough to smooth out bursts and lulls in the data flow, and allows network hardware run at a consistently lower speed. Alternatively, information can be grouped into fewer, larger bursts to let the hardware sleep between chunks.

With today's hardware, either strategy could save between 40 and 80% of the energy used by a network's hardware, according to the researchers' simulations.

See the full Story via external site: technology.newscientist.com