Researchers at the University of Waterloo are working on creating a greener internet.
Computing accounts for nearly five per cent of the world’s total energy use daily, a number that will only increase as more power is needed for the increased use of artificial intelligence, said Martin Karsten, professor of computer science in Waterloo’s Math Faculty.
Among the big users are the growing number of data centres, where large volumes of information are handled constantly.
“Information arrives at data centres in ‘packets,’ and then the data centre’s front end, like a receptionist at a front desk, figures out where to send those packets,” explained Karsten .
Along with his co-author, computer science grad student Peter Cai, Karsten started the current research after noticing some other researchers doing similar research looking for efficiencies.
“We looked at this, and we were a little skeptical, and said, ‘before we throw everything else, how about we make sure we understand where exactly these performance benefits are and where they’re coming from,’” said Karsten.
“In the course of doing so, we began to understand where these performance benefits were coming from, as these other researchers claimed, and we realized there is a good chunk of these benefits we can get without throwing everything out.”
Karsten teamed up with Joe Damato, an engineer at Fastly, to develop a small section of code – approximately 30 lines – that would improve network traffic processing. They made a few changes and found a way to reduce the energy use of some data centres by as much as 30 per cent.
The research started as it often does, as an idea they wanted to experiment with, and sometimes this becomes something the world can use, Kersten told The Observer.
“It’s like building a Formula One race car. It’s not allowed on the streets for good reason, right? But you learn a couple of things, and then some of these lessons learned eventually make their way over into regular cars,” said Karsten.
“When we then realized what we might be having, one of those nuggets here that can make its way into the regular production-grade systems relatively easily.”
While creating a new mechanism, Karsten and his collaborator noticed that there was already a mechanism that would generate the same benefits.
But the difference between this new one and the one they found was one was more of a brute-force mechanism, which caused the computer to be busy all of the time, which was not very efficient, said Karsten.
“What we can do is we automatically switch back and forth. If there is lots of traffic, we use the new mechanism, which makes us very efficient and very fast. However, if there’s not a lot of traffic, we go back into energy savings mode and do this automatically,” he explained.
This new research has real-world benefits, including big companies like Google and Amazon, which could save gigawatt hours of energy worldwide.
Using this research, a green computer server room will be built in the university’s new Mathematics Four building. These are examples of greener research going on in tech that need to be prioritized, said Karsten.
“We all have a part to play in building a greener future.”
