GREEN COMPUTING

CONTENT

News
Cooling Systems
Memory
Processor
Data Center
Companies and Institutions
References
See Also

NEWS

COOLING SYSTEM

Tyndall National Institute: Nanomaterial reduces energy consumption in semiconductor chips

{Microelectronics Applications Integration, Tyndall Ntl Inst. / Dr. Razeeb}
(Oct. 2010)
The development of a new nano-material is dramatically reducing the operating temperature of silicon chip components and circuits, thereby enhancing the reliability and lifetime of electronics in products ranging from smart phones to automotive electronics... [14, 15]

EPFL: Green Computing and Cooling System (Keynote Speech)

{EPFL, Embedded Systems Laboratory / Prof. Atienza}
(March 2010)
Prof. Atienza gave a Keynote speech at the INFORUM conference at the CERN about the vision for system-level cooling and energy management in Green datacenters and high-performance embedded systems.[13]
Prof Atienza is also involved in the Nano-Tera.ch Project CMOSAIC

Tessera: A Laptop Cooled with Ionic Wind

{Tessera/ Robert Yung}
(May 2009)
So-called ionic-cooling systems have been demonstrated in research labs before, but now Tessera, an international chip-packaging company based in San Jose, CA, has demonstrated an ionic-cooling system integrated into a working laptop.
The system can extract roughly 30 percent more heat from a laptop than a conventional fan can, and lab tests show that it could potentially consume only half as much power, the company says. [1]

IBM Zurich: Computer Clusters That Heat Houses, a novel water-cooling system makes it more efficient for computers to heat buildings.

{IBM Zurich Research Lab/ Bruno Michel, Manager of Advanced Thermal Packaging}
9June 2009)
Thanks to a novel on-chip water-cooling system developed by the company, the thermal energy from a cluster of computer processors can be efficiently recycled to provide hot water for an office, says Bruno Michel, manager of advanced thermal packaging at IBM's Zurich Research Laboratory,in Switzerland. The goal, he says, is to improve the energy efficiency of large computing clusters and reduce their environmental impact.
A novel network of microfluidic capillaries inside a heat sink is attached to the surface of each chip in the computer cluster, which allows water to be piped to within microns of the semiconductor material itself. [2]

RTI: Cooling Chips with Thermoelectrics, Researchers have made ultrathin refrigerators for microprocessors.

{RTI/ Rama Venkatasubramanian, Senior Research Director}
(Jan. 2009)
Now researchers at Intel, RTI International of North Carolina, and Arizona State University have shown that it's possible to build an efficient microrefrigerator that can target hot spots on chips, saving power and space, and more effectively cooling the entire system. Their work also demonstrates, for the first time, that it is possible to integrate thermoelectric material into chip packaging, making the technology more practical than ever before.[3]

Icetope: Put Your Servers In a Bath to Cut Cooling Costs to Almost Nothing.

{Icetope/ Dan Chester, CEO},
(Nov. 2009)
At the Supercomputing 2009 conferencing this week, Iceotope unveiled a new technology to allow servers to be cooled by immersion in water, a new design that the company estimates could cut energy used to cool data centers by as much as 93 percent.
Iceotope calls the technology an "end-to-end liquid" approach to cooling, bringing a synthetic coolant directly to individual servers, immersing the entire compartment called a cooling module. [4]

MEMORY

EPFL: Racetrack memory

{Laboratory of Nanomagnetism and Spin Dynamics (LNSD), EPFL /
(Nov. 2010)
Imagine a computer equipped with shock-proof memory that’s 100,000 times faster and consumes less power than current hard disks. prof Kläui has invented a new kind of “Racetrack” memory, a high-volume, ultra-rapid read-write magnetic memory that may soon make such a creature possible. ... [17. EPFL News],

ETRI at Daejeon: Flexible Graphene Memristors

{Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute, Daejeon, South Korea / Sung-Yool Choi},
(Oct. 2010)
A flexible nonvolatile memory, based on memristors and using thin graphene oxide films. Memristors promise a new type of dense, cheap, and low-power memory and have typically been made using metal oxide thin films. The new graphene oxide devices should be cheaper and simpler to fabricate... [16]

Numonyx: Intel and STMicroelectronics have formed a joint venture that plans to commercialize phase-change memory.

{Numonyx/ Brian Harrison, CEO},
(Feb. 2008)
In the near term, phase-change memory could replace the expensive and energy-consuming random access memory in cell phones, and in a few more years, it could potentially become a cost-effective alternative to flash. A customer who uses a phone with phase-change memory might notice extended battery life, said Harrison. "Intel and STMicroelectronics have been working [together] on phase-change memory for more than five years," he said. "We have a product today that we are sampling, and expect to bring it to market this year. I believe it will be one to two years before it becomes widely available." Brian Harrison, CEO of Numonyx, said that phase-change memory has all the benefits of NOR and NAND flash technologies. (NOR is used in cell phones to execute code, and NAND has been used as a storage memory.) [5] best headphones best earbudsbest over ear headphones

U. of Tokyo: Cheap, Plastic Memory for Flexible Devices; A new type of flash could be used in e-readers.

{University of Tokyo, Department of Applied Physics / Prof. Takao Someya},
(Dec. 2009)
Cheap and plastic aren't words often associated with cutting-edge technology. But researchers in Tokyo have created a new kind of plastic low-cost flash memory that could find its way into novel flexible electronics. The prototype plastic flash memory cannot match silicon's storage density, long-term stability, or number of rewrite cycles. But its low cost could make it possible to integrate flash memory into more unconventional electronics. For example, cheap plastic memory devices might be incorporated into e-paper or disposable sensor tags. [6]

NUS: A Step Toward Superfast Carbon Memory: Graphene could make computer hard drives denser and speedier.

{National University of Singapore, Dept of Physics/ Barbaros �zyilmaz },
(April 2009)
Cheap and plastic aren't words often associated with cutting-edge technology. But researchers in Tokyo have created a new kind of plastic low-cost flash memory that could find its way into novel flexible electronics. The prototype plastic flash memory cannot match silicon's storage density, long-term stability, or number of rewrite cycles. But its low cost could make it possible to integrate flash memory into more unconventional electronics. For example, cheap plastic memory devices might be incorporated into e-paper or disposable sensor tags. [7]

IBM: Racetrack Memory, Stuart Parkin is using nanowires to create an ultradense memory chip

{IBM/ Stuart Parkin},
(April 2009)
Both magnetic disk drives and existing solid-state memory technologies are essentially two-dimensional, Parkin says, relying on a single layer of either magnetic bits or transistors. "Both of these technologies have evolved over the last 50 years, but they've done it by scaling the devices smaller and smaller or developing new means of accessing bits," he says. Parkin sees both technologies reaching their size limits in the coming decades. "Our idea is totally different from any memory that's ever been made," he says, "because it's three-dimensional." The key is an array of U-shaped magnetic nanowires, arranged vertically like trees in a forest. [8]

U. of California & U. of Massachusetts: A New Route to Terabit Memory, Polymers that arrange into nanostructures could store terabits on a square inch.

{U. of California, Berkeley, Dept of Materials Science and Engineering / Dr. Ting Xu}, {U. of Massachusetts Amherst, Polymer Science & Engineering / Prof. Thomas Russell},
(Feb. 2009)
The self-assembling of materials known as block copolymers could provide a low-cost, efficient way to fabricate ultra-high-density computer memory. Block copolymers, which are made of chemically different polymers linked together, can arrange themselves into arrays of nanoscale dots on surfaces, which could be used as templates for creating tiny magnetic bits that store data on hard disks. Until now, though, there was no simple, quick way to coax the block copolymer to make the desired arrays over large areas. [9]

PROCESSOR

The microchip industry and research community is always hunting for ways to make electronics more energy efficient, and it was prompted to rethink the fundamental design aspect of microprocessors.

Intel: Release of a green processors.

{Intel},
(March 2008)
The new chips takes advantage of Intel's unique 45 nanometer manufacturing capabilities and reinvented transistor formula that combine to boost performance and reduce power consumption in data centers, Intel said in a press release. [10]

U. of Michigan: A Picowatt Processor, A low-power chip could be used for implantable medical sensors.

{U. Michigan, VSLI / David Blaauw},
(July 2008)
Now researchers at the University of Michigan have made a processor that takes up just one millimeter square and whose power consumption is so low that emerging thin-film batteries of the same size could power it for 10 years or more, says David Blaauw, professor of electrical engineering and computer science at Michigan and one of the lead researchers on the project.
But when this processor, dubbed the Phoenix, is coupled with a battery, the whole package would only be a cubic millimeter in volume. At this scale, Blaauw says, it could be feasible to build the chip into a thick contact lens and use it to monitor pressure in the eye, which would be useful for glaucoma detection. It could also be implanted under the skin to sense glucose levels in subcutaneous fluid.[12]

GREEN DATA CENTER

WEB: Conference

{Web Conferencing Basics / Samir Hamesh},
Web Conferencing is green computing. For many businesses, being eco-friendly and reducing carbon footprint can be challenging. But any business that needs to fly or drive to meetings, training sessions, or sales calls can employ web conferencing to help share the load.
Employees and customers alike describe teleconferencing as having all the benefits of face to face meetings, yet with the convenience of always having their computer handy. Learn more about Web Conferencing Basics.

IBM: Project Big Green

{IBM / Steve Sams},
Project Big Green is a $1 billion investment to dramatically increase the efficiency of IBM products. New IBM products and services, announced as part of Project Big Green, include a five step approach to energy efficiency in the data center that, if followed, will sharply reduce data center energy consumption and transform clients' technology infrastructure into "green" data centers, with energy savings of approximately 42 percent for an average data center.[11]

COMPANIES & INSTITUTIONS

Companies

Tessera
IBM Research Lab
RTI
Icetop
Numonyx
IBM & IBM bis
Intel

Institutions

Elect. and Telecom. Research Inst. Daejeon
Tyndall Natl Inst.
EPFL & EPFL2
Tokyo U.
Natl. University of Singapore
U. of California, Berkley
U. of Michigan

REFERENCES

Nano Tera Wiki : GreenComputing