درباره این اپیزود
Host Chris Adams and guest Romain Jacob delve into the often-overlooked energy demands of networking infrastructure to discover A Greener Internet that Sleeps More. While AI and data centers usually dominate the conversation, networking still consumes significant power, comparable to the energy usage of entire countries. They discuss innovative practices to make the internet greener, such as putting networks to sleep during low usage periods and extending the life of hardware. Romain talks about his recent Hypnos paper, which won Best Paper at HotCarbon 2024. He shares his team’s award-winning research on how energy demand for networking kit powering the internet can be reduced by simply by powering down links when not in use.
Learn more about our people:
Find out more about the GSF:
Resources:
- SCION Architecture [11:30]
- Environmental Impacts of Internet Technology (eimpact) [17:15]
- Why we should be intentional about the mental models we use for thinking when we think about digital sustainability | Chris Adams [18:30]
- A Sleep Study for ISP Networks: Evaluating Link Sleeping on Real World Data | Romain Jacob, Lukas Röllin and Laurent Vanbever [18:59]
- Network energy use not directly proportional to data volume: The power model approach for more reliable network energy consumption calculations | David Mytton [38:55]
- Co2.js - The Issue | The Green Web Foundation [42:57]
- Rethinking Allocation in High-Baseload Systems: A Demand-Proportional Network Electricity Intensity Metric — University of Bristol | Daniel Schien [43:53]
- Introducing Web Sustainability Guidelines | 2023 | Blog | W3C [49:31]
- Greening of Streaming [52:16]
- Network Power Zoo | ETH Zurich [54:46]
Other source material:
- A Primer on Optimistic UI | Imhoff
- Response Time Limits: Article by Jakob Nielsen | NN Group
- Optimistic UI Patterns for Improved Perceived Performance | Simon Hearne
- Reducing the Energy Footprint of Cellular Networks with Delay-Tolerant Users | IEEE Journals & Magazine
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TRANSCRIPT BELOW:
Romain Jacob: We used to consider that energy is cheap. Energy is there. We don't need to worry too much about it. So it's just simpler to plug the thing in, assume energy is there. You can draw power as much as you want, whenever you want, for as much as you want. And it's time to get away from that.
Chris Adams: Hello, and welcome to Environment Variables, brought to you by the Green Software Foundation. In each episode, we discuss the latest news and events surrounding green software. On our show, you can expect candid conversations with top experts in their field who have a passion for how to reduce the greenhouse gas emissions of software.
I'm your host, Chris Adams.
Hello, and welcome to another edition of Environment Variables, where we bring you the latest news and updates from the world of sustainable software development. I'm your host, Chris Adams. Back in episode 10 of this podcast in September 2022, we did a deep dive into the subject of green networking, because while a lot of the time people talk about the energy demands of AI and data centers, in 2024, in absolute terms, the amount of power consumed by networking was still larger.
Back then in 2022, the best figures, when we looked at this, came from the AI, which put the energy usage of data networks at around 250 terawatt hours per year. So that's about the same as all of Spain's energy usage in 2023, so that's not nothing. Now, it's a few years later, 2024, and the best figures from the same agency, the IEA, now give us a range of between 260 and 360 terawatt hours, which could be anything up to a jump of 50 percent in three years now.
Now because of much of this power is coming from fossil fuels, this is a real problem, climate wise. So what can we do about this? With me to explore this once again, is my friend Romain Jacob, who helped guide us through the subject in 2022, along with Dr. Yves Schouler at Intel at the time.
His team's recent research won the Best Paper Award at HotCarbon, the conference that has fast become a fixture on the green IT and digital sustainability circuit. So he seemed a good person to ask about this. Romain, thank you so much for joining me for this podcast. Can I give you the floor to introduce yourself before we revisit the world of green networks?
Romain Jacob: Chris, welcome. I'm very happy to be back on the podcast to talk a little bit more about this. Hello, I'm Romain, I'm a postdoctoral researcher at ETH Zurich in Switzerland. I've been working in sustainability for two to three years now, more or less full time, as much as full time research happens in academia. And yeah, I was, I had the pleasure to present some of our technical work at HotCarbon and I'm sure we're going to deep dive into a bit more in the podcast.
Chris Adams: Okay. Thank you, Romain. And for people who are new to this podcast, my name is Chris Adams. I am the executive director of the Green Web Foundation. We're a Dutch nonprofit focused on reaching a f...
