Coreix Managed Servers

Yahoo! has said it will no longer purchase carbon offsets for its operations, focusing its climate strategy on reducing the energy used by its data centres. The move reverses the company’s 2007 announcement that it would invest in carbon-offset projects in order to become carbon neutral.

“Reducing our carbon footprint has always been a priority and we’ve decided to focus all our energy and investment on that philosophy,” said David Filo, the company’s co-founder and Chief Yahoo. “We believe creating highly-efficient data centres will have a greater long-term, direct impact on the environment and gives us the best opportunity to play a leadership role in addressing climate change.”

Source: Green Business

They have been used to model climate change, forecast economic trends, and simulate the intricate complexities folding proteins. Now IBM has something new in store for high-performance computers: heating buildings. 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.

A pilot scheme involving a computer system fitted with the technology is expected to save up to 30 tons of carbon dioxide emissions per year–the equivalent of an 85% carbon footprint reduction. 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. By having water flow so close to each chip, heat can be removed more efficiently. Water heated to 60 °C is then passed through a heat exchanger to provide heat that is delivered elsewhere.

Source: Technology Review