There are approximately twenty million servers around the globe functioning to bring those web pages to your computer screen with a click. However, most of the times, an estimated 84% of these machines are sitting idle for a greater part of the day, leading to great losses of energy and releasing CO2 in return. The situation is analogous to a television kept on the entire day, irrespective of whether you want to watch it or not. This in itself explains the amount of energy that is wasted unjustly by simply keeping the computers on – as shutting down the computers individually and that too time and again is a tedious affair.
The drive for developing an eco-friendly computing environment led to researchers in Portugal to come up with a program called SPIRIT that automates the servers to shut down computers when they are not in use and then to turn them on when required. The researchers gave SPIRIT trial run last year in the University of Lisbon which engaged 200 computers in this operation. The outcome of the trial run showed a remarkable reduction of 5 tons of CO2 emissions that would have otherwise contributed to polluting our environment – thus making SPIRIT eco-friendly.
This program has set a precedent for systems administrator all around the world to adopt or crate such eco-friendly methods of reducing CO2 emissions as computers account for 1% of the same. The researchers state that drastic reductions can happen in situations where the computers are not used optimally and are practically idle for most part of the day. Although SPIRIT can be downloaded for free online, however, for a layman the task itself is a little complex to understand as observed by the researchers.
Via: Discovery News
