jisc's greening ict programme
DESCRIPTION
Slides from a presentation to the Environmental Association of Universities and Colleges' Annual Conference at the University of York, April 2011TRANSCRIPT
JISC’s Greening ICT Programme
Rob BristowProgramme Manager – Green ICT
Sustainability at your institution – EAUC Conference April 2011
Sustainability at your institution – EAUC Conference April 2011
Drivers for Green ICT
ICT Energy and carbon emissions
Carbon Reduction Commitment (CRC)
Funding council drivers
Reduce costs
Improve efficiency
Enhance reputation
New ways of working and new paradigms for teaching, learning, research and administration
Sustainability at your institution – EAUC Conference April 2011
The Problem
760,000 PCs
215,000 servers
147,000 networked printers
512,000 Mwh of electricity
275,000 tonnes of CO2
High costs - £116 million + in 2009 (Electricity HE & FE in UK)
Picture: Josie FraserSome rights reserved
Sustainability at your institution – EAUC Conference April 2011
Production Burdens
A typical semiconductor facility:- 591 million gallons DI water- 5.2 million pounds of chemicals- 8.8 million kwh of electricity
PC/LCD production- 1,000+ hazardous substances
High energy materials- 2.5 tonnes of rock- for 1 gram of gold
Sustainability at your institution – EAUC Conference April 2011
The Opportunity
Smarter systems, buildings and processes
Re-think the campus and the curriculum
De-materialisation, dis-aggregation and dis-intermediation
HE as exemplar for low-carbon IT
Green as driver for other efficiency gains
ICT as cost versus ICT as opportunity
Sustainability at your institution – EAUC Conference April 2011
Data Centres and Server Rooms
“the physical reality of modern campus CyberInfrastructure (CI) is a complex network of ad hoc and sub-optimal energy environments in departmental facilities”
– Green Light project - UC - San Diego http://greenlight.calit2.net/
But demand is growing
– Processing
– Storage – Exabytes of data
– E-Science
EU Code of Conduct for Data Centres
Picture: Josie FraserSome rights reserved
Sustainability at your institution – EAUC Conference April 2011
The Desktop
Still over 50% of ICT energy use in most institutions
Thin client may not be best way to go
– Balance back-end energy use with support costs, etc
Powerdown solutions available
– Commercial
– Open source (late 2011 – JISC funded project
User-owned devices and the infrastructure to support them
Sustainability at your institution – EAUC Conference April 2011
Printing and Print Substitution
“(Staff) printing is out of control1”
– Often only measure is how much paper gets bought
Tacking printing can raise difficult issues in some places
Form a cross-functional team and team and get the users on board
Roll out Multi-functional devices and cull desktop printers
Enable power-saving modes and duplex printing by default
95% of energy associated with printing is the paper
Look at print substitution and handheld devices
Sustainability at your institution – EAUC Conference April 2011
Procurement
How to buy the best kit?
50% of energy use is in the manufacture and distribution – 50% in lifetime use
Energy Star and EPEAT are useful yardsticks
Need for proper overview of total (environmental) cost of ownership
TCO Certified for Monitors
Disposal
– Where is your kit ending up?
More difficult making valid comparisons when it comes to servers and the like
Sustainability at your institution – EAUC Conference April 2011
The Programme
Key objectives for the programme
Greening the sector - attitudinal and behaviour change embedded across the sector
New sustainable procurement paradigms
Sustainability seen as key driver and yardstick for sector activities
Harnessing of sector research activities
Intended outputs from this programme
Substantive body of knowledge illuminating areas of uncertainty in respect to Green ICT
Exemplar projects providing leadership and best practice example
Outcomes
Reduction of sector carbon footprint and associated energy costs
Increased capacity and expertise across the sector in sustainable ICT
Improved reputation of sector and UK as leaders in this area
Reduction in waste generated by ICT use
Sustainability at your institution – EAUC Conference April 2011
The story so far
Suste-IT Project
– Year long look at Green ICT in HE and FE
– Report, briefing papers, case studies
• Carbon, Energy and Environmental Issues in Higher Education - Current Regulations and Schemes
• Virtual Servers for Efficient and Flexible IT Infrastructure
• Responsible Energy Costs in Higher and Further Education
– Carbon Footprinting Tool
– Thin/Thick Client tool
– http://www.goodcampus.org/files/index.php?siteID=
Sustainability at your institution – EAUC Conference April 2011
Innovation Work
Research & Exploration
– Growing the knowledge base
Technical Innovation
– Joining things up, getting developers engaged in Green ICT
Estates led strand
– Building capacity
– Projects led by Estates Directors
Institutional Transformation
– Re-thinking the campus and the curriculum
Community engagement
– Working with EAUC & London Higher
Sustainability at your institution – EAUC Conference April 2011
Research & Exploration
Cloud computing
– Work with colleges through 157 Group
Video-conferencing and events (The Welsh Video Network, HEEPI and Bristol)
Scientific computing and energy usage in labs (HEEPI)
How to engage users in owning the problem (De Montfort and Oxford)
Pledging systems (Pembrokeshire College)
How sustainable is thin-client (really)? (Leeds Met)
Exploring where the energy goes in the server room (Leeds Met)
Sustainability at your institution – EAUC Conference April 2011
Technical Innovation
Powering down super-computers (Oxford)
Rationalising file storage (Cardiff)
System to share high-end kit both with and across institutions (Loughborough)
Print substitution via e-Readers (Edgehill)
Widgets to display energy usage (De Montfort)
Open-source PC Powerdown solution (Aberystwyth)
Photo-voltaic-cells to power evaporative coolers in a data-centre (Worcester College)
Sustainability at your institution – EAUC Conference April 2011
Estates Engagement
Aim is to build capacity in Estates for working with innovation and to foster links with IT
Tackling laboratory energy use (Bradford)
Heat and light by timetable (Leeds Met)
Tackling heating and cooling overshoots
Further work to improve the legacy data-centre (Imperial College)
Photo-voltaic-cells to power evaporative coolers in a data-centre (Worcester College)
Sustainability at your institution – EAUC Conference April 2011
Institutional Transformation
Procurement and Scope 3 Emissions (De Montfort)
– Getting a handle on the rest of the carbon
– Good links with procurement, estates, and IT
Understanding the environmental implications of different modes of curriculum delivery (Open University)
– Does it matter? What might be the best way forward?
Energy use and students (Coventry)
– How to engage with this rapidly changing constituency
Academic events and travel (Bristol)
– Understanding the place that travel has in academic life
Sustainability at your institution – EAUC Conference April 2011
Community Engagement
Embedding and uptake
Work with the EAUC to help institutions benchmark their ICT carbon footprint and develop action plans
Outreach beyond the innovation projects
Similar work with London HEIs run by London Higher
Support and Synthesis work by JISC Netskills
Links to other parts of JISC’s Organisational Support agenda
– Strategic Management of ICT
– Flexible Service Delivery and Enterprise Architectures
– Cloud computing
Efficient, Effective and Environmentally Sustainable
Sustainability at your institution – EAUC Conference April 2011
London Higher Study - Results
Sustainability at your institution – EAUC Conference April 2011
Results to date
Phase I projects starting to report – headlines:
– Planet Filestore Project (Cardiff) – shows relevance of moving infrequently accessed files to lower tiers of storage. Being funded to develop online decision application to allow others to see if this makes sense for them
Pembrokeshire College – Will be making their pledging system open source and releasing code and how-to guides
Thin client investigation at Leeds Met shows a well specified low power conventional PC is more efficient than thin-client in real world situations
Open source code from Oxford that helps people running high-performance computer clusters power down idle nodes
Review of e-Reader devices and their usefulness in paper substitution (Edgehill University)
Sustainability at your institution – EAUC Conference April 2011
Looking ahead – 2020 Agendas
Technology/material transitions
– New storage technologies
Energy aware software
Net zero carbon- data centres – Paper Mills in Finland next to Hydro Dam- networks- supply chains
Local integration
Greening the cloud
Sustainability at your institution – EAUC Conference April 2011
http://www.jisc.ac.uk/whatwedo/programmes/greeningict.aspx - JISC’s Greening ICT Programme
http://re.jrc.ec.europa.eu/energyefficiency/html/standby_initiative_data_centers.htm - EU C of C
http://greenict.jiscinvolve.org/ - JISC’s Green ICT Blog
Good Campus Site
– Home of Suste-IT outputs and much more
#greeningict - Tag in use on Twitter et al
Sustainability at your institution – EAUC Conference April 2011
Rob Bristow
– Programme Manager (Green ICT)
– +44 (0) 7825 823 282
– Twitter: robbristow
– Blog: http://greenict.jiscinvolve.org/
– Mailing list: [email protected]
– Sign up at:
• http://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/SUSTAINABLE-ICT