Little Miss Enviro Geek : Microsoft Research

Some personal news...

biwirth — Fri, 18 Sep 2009 03:24:00 GMT

Hello Dear Blog Readers,

(hmmm....that kinda sounds like the beginning of one of those SPAM emails)

I wanted to let you all know I am moving on from Microsoft and shall no longer be blogging here. I'll be moving an archive of these posts to my website http://www.greenitstrategy.com and shall continue blogging there on Green IT.

So what will I be doing now?

Well, I have decided to take some time off, write a book and maybe look into starting my own business. Regardless, you can always catch me through my website and please do feel free to visit me there.

Thank you to everyone who contacted me with their Green IT questions over the past two years and gave me feedback. I really appreciate your support and good luck with your own Green IT initiatives.

Kind Regards,

Bianca AKA Little Miss Enviro Geek

Mr B's announcement on Environmental Sustainability @ MS

biwirth — Thu, 12 Mar 2009 06:38:16 GMT

OK so first I'll apologise for taking naptime on my blog for the past month+. I have no excuse other than perceived lack of time - you may send me to the principal for punishment. Speaking of the 'head', today our illustrious leader, Mr Ballmer, made some announcements on Environmental Sustainability in Microsoft.

First up: we have promised to reduce our emissions 30% per unit of revenue by 2012. Considering the Prime Minister of Australia could only manage a paltry 5% for the whole of Australia, I'd say our target it pretty <bleep> brilliant.

Second: he encouraged all employees on the things they can do to help meet this target:

Using IT to improve energy efficiency: check out our newly revised website www.microsoft.com/environment for information on reducing energy consumption using technology
Accelerating research on environmental sustainability: check out www.research.microsoft.com for our work in this area
Responsible environmental leadership: the 30% reduction will be achieved through things like building management, reducing air travel, optimising our supply chain, and investing in concentrated programs

Checkout the formal blog post from our E&S Team for more info: http://blogs.msdn.com/see/archive/2009/03/12/reducing-microsoft-s-carbon-footprint.aspx

Microsoft Research: Spin server disks down to save energy

biwirth — Wed, 16 Jul 2008 08:49:00 GMT

As part of ongoing research into the energy efficiency of data centers, Microsoft Research (MSR) have released a paper discussing the results of testing disk subsystems usage and potential to 'spin down' disks when they are not being used. In the past there was an assumption disks couldn't be spun down due to continuous use, however MSR found during their week long trial on 36 volumes in their data center there were "significant" periods of idle time.

Their solution to helping reduce energy used by disks, up to 45-60%, was to enable functionality called "write off-loading" - this allows write requests on spun-down disks to be temporarily redirected to alternative persistent storage (such as NVRAM or flash).

A few interesting facts from their paper:

enterprise storage sub-systems don't have advanced power management capabilities (because it is inherently difficult) and they consume approximately 10w when idle;
write off-loading is a block level, transparent process;
the key challenge was consistency - "Each write request to any volume can be off-loaded to one of several other locations depending on a number of criteria, including the power state and the current load on the destination. This per-operation load balancing improves performance, but it means that successive writes of the same logical block could be offloaded to different destinations. It is imperative that the consistency of the original volume is maintained even in the presence of failures. We achieve this by persisting sufficient metadata with each off-loaded write to reconstruct the latest version of each block after a failure."
They tested two types of off-loading: machine level off-load (writes are offloaded to a "logger" on the same server) and rack level off-load (writes are offloaded to any "logger" in the rack) and found the latter to utilise the least energy (55% of the baseline).

Check out the complete paper outlining the details of the tests and associated research here: http://research.microsoft.com/camsys/paper-final.pdf

Microsoft Research: Using Computer Prediction Models for Forest Dynamics

biwirth — Sat, 14 Jun 2008 01:24:00 GMT

In the IT world we sometimes only see the inside of a data room and a page of code. In this context we might wonder what all the fuss about Environmentally Sustainable IT is. On one hand we can change the data centre to be more energy efficient, on the other side we can use technology to better understand the environment around us and the potential impacts we could hope to avoid. The latter is exactly what researchers at Microsoft Research Cambridge have done this month, publishing two papers in the journal Science this month...

"One, entitled Predictive Models of Forest Dynamics, authored by [Drew] Purves and Stephen Pacala, of the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at Princeton University, is an excellent treatment of the state of the art in modeling forest dynamics and its impact on climate prediction. Microsoft Research Cambridge has prepared a video explaining the overview.

The second, Animal Versus Wind Dispersal and the Robustness of Tree Species to Deforestation, examines the response by tree species to the destruction of forests. That paper was based on work conducted at Microsoft Research Cambridge by Daniel Montoya, of the Departamento de Ecología of Spain’s Universidad de Alcalá, under Purves’ supervision, and written with Miguel A. Rodriguez, of the Universidad de Alcalá, and Miguel A. Zavala, of the Centro de Investigación Forestal at Spain’s Institito Nacional de Investigación y Tecnología.This paper, too, is featured in a video."

“By applying various methods in computational data analysis to a large source for forest data,” Montoya says, “we have confirmed that, in Spain at least, plants with animal-dispersed seeds are less vulnerable to habitat loss, because animals provide trees with an intelligent dispersal mechanism, travelling and distributing seeds between areas of remaining forest. In contrast, a wind-dispersal method is more susceptible to habitat loss, as seeds are more likely to fall in inhospitable environments.”

Checkout the full article: http://research.microsoft.com/news/featurestories/publish/ForestModeling.aspx