IBM and chums kick off 'green' patents project
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Share and share alike to save the planet A number of big name tech firms including IBM, Sony and Nokia have joined forces to work on a patent-sharing plan, dubbed Eco-Patents Commons.â¦
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A coalition of technology companies and environmental groups led by Google Inc. and Intel Corp. launched an initiative Tuesday to conserve electricity and curb global warming emissions by making the world's computers and servers more energy-efficient.
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IBM and two other companies have developed a greenhouse gas meter that measures carbon output across various industries and devices.
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Former executives from companies including Sun Microsystems, BEA Systems and Oracle are launching a venture called Cassatt, which looks to automate IT operations, leverage commodity hardware and software and govern network compute cycles in a gridlike manner.
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Fresh from setting a record for performance among supercomputers just a few days ago, IBM on Monday announced it is making a commercial version of its Blue Gene system available to be aimed at businesses and scientific researchers.
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(InfoWorld) - IBM researchers are counting on a 40-year-old technology to keep modern, state-of-the-art datacenters running cool and allow companies to squeeze more computing power from the electricity they consume. These considerations are more important than ever. The power consumed by a rack of servers has risen from around 5 kilowatts (kW) of power per server rack five years ago to as much as 30 kW today, thanks to the introduction of more powerful processors and denser blade servers. And the power-consumption levels will continue rising in the years ahead. "People want more compute power and we can give it to them because we can package this into a smaller footprint, basically," said Roger Schmidt, chief thermal architect and distinguished engineer at IBM's Server and Workstation Division. The challenge that Schmidt and his colleagues face is how to dissipate the increasing levels of heat these systems generate. "We're working on this all the way from the chip to the datacenter," he said. At the datacenter level, Schmidt sees an expanded role for water cooling as a means to bring heat levels down. Water cooling, which uses small pipes filled with distilled or deionized water to dissipate heat, was first used by IBM to cool mainframe computers during the 1960s. The technology, which was used in more than 90 percent of mainframes by the mid-1980s, was given a second lease on life in 2005, when IBM introduced its line of Cool Blue water-cooling products. One such product is IBM's $4,299 Rear Door Heat eXchanger, which attaches to the rear of a server rack. Four inches thick and weighing about 32 kilograms (70 pounds) when filled with water, the Rear Door Heat eXchanger, can absorb more than half of the heat coming from a server rack, according to IBM. IBM's water-cooling systems, as well asÂ competing products from companies like Hewlett-Packard, offer several benefits for datacenters. Most importantly, water can absorb more heat than air, and the pumps required to circulate water in a cooling system consume less power than air-conditioning systems. And IBM plans to expand its line of water-cooling products in the months ahead. "We've got other enhancements coming out shortly," Schmidt said, declining to elaborate on specific details. One potential enhancement is to extend water cooling from the rear of the server rack to specific components, such as processors -- as was done with some IBM mainframes. "Once you bring water to the rack, you've got a lot of options," Schmidt said. Convincing datacenter operators to pipe water through racks filled with expensive servers and invaluable data is not always easy. The easiest to convince are those IT managers with experience from the days when water-cooled mainframes were the backbone of large corporations, Schmidt said. But many remain nervous at the thought of water-filled pipes coursing through rooms filled with expensive servers and invaluable data -- even though water is already a key component of all datacenters. "Water cooling in datacenters is already there," Schmidt said. "The chilled water that's brought to the air conditioning units? That's water and it's in the pipes right above the server racks. We're just plugging into that to apply that at the rack level."
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Former executives from companies such as Sun Microsystems, BEA Systems, and Oracle this week are formally launching a venture called Cassatt, which is endeavoring to automate IT operations, leverage commodity hardware and software, and govern network compute cycles in a grid-like manner.
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While grid computing vendors Sun and IBM are taking the reins of the utility computing market, the competition is collaborating to provide proof-of-concept projects to improve and showcase their services and offerings.
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U.S. patent leader IBM said late on Monday it plans to donate 500 patents for free use by software developers, marking a major shift of intellectual property strategy for the world's top computer maker and a challenge to the high-tech industry.
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Computer users are being asked to donate their unused processor power to help solve social and environmental research problems. The IBM-backed project, called World Community Grid, aims to put the untapped
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Google and Intel today kicked off an effort to help blunt the impact of global warming by bringing greater energy efficiency to personal computers and servers.
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Spearheaded by Microsoft, Sun, and other high tech vendors, The Green Grid is generating support among industry groups, users, and government agencies for building standards for efficient data center energy management.
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IBM Corp. says it has dreamed up a new method for profiting from its vast storehouse of patents. And by the way, the company wants to patent the idea.
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By Larry Rulison, Albany Times Union, N.Y.  May 31--NORTH GREENBUSH -- Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute is seeking to join its powerful new IBM Blue Gene supercomputer with one at Stony Brook University to do cutting-edge biotechnology research.
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MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif.  - Google and Intel are going green, and they hope to drag the world&#39;s computer users with them. The tech giants Tuesday unveiled the Climate Savers Computing Initiative, a voluntary program they hope will make energy-saving computers the norm. A typical PC wastes about half the electricity it draws. Power-saving technology exists but costs about $20 extra per PC, or $30 per back-office server, says Intel Senior Vice President Pat Gelsinger.
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At the SC2004 conferenceÂ  last week, IBM unveiled plans to build a commercial version of its Blue Gene supercomputer intended for businesses and for a number of scientific and research markets.
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NOVEMBER 17, 2004  - IBM and officials from some of the world&#39;s leading science, education and philanthropic organizations yesterday launched a global grid computing project aimed at harnessing unused global computing power to help solve a