The eco-friendly aspects of Virtual Labs

Posted on by Maria Salama

image of a 'data cloud'

“Cloud is about how you do computing, not where you do computing.” – Paul Maritz, VMware CEO

In today’s world, the need to “Go Green” is stronger than ever. The concept of Green Computing, mentioned in my earlier blog, aims to reduce the carbon footprint generated by the Information Technology and Systems business. This can help in preventing global warming that causes improper function in the natural atmosphere.

Cloud Computing has revolutionised the IT industry in many ways. Customers consume 77% fewer servers, 84% less power and reduce carbon emissions by 88% by using the cloud, and there is no denying that it has positive impact on the environment. In a study to determine how cloud computing reduces the carbon footprint related to computing. a report titled ‘The Carbon Benefits of Cloud Computing: a Study of the Microsoft Cloud,’ revealed the numerous environmental benefits of cloud computing. Microsoft cloud computing is 93% energy efficient and has 98% lower carbon emissions than on-site data centres.

Cloud computing offers more than just a way to safely store data, increase efficiency, and reduce costs. It has substantial environmental benefits that are too many to ignore in an era where global warming and climate change are pressing issues. Cloud computing can save billions of dollars in energy costs and lessen carbon emissions by millions of metric tons. It offers organisations the ability to reduce their energy consumption, cut their carbon footprint, and shift to a greener and smarter future. Meanwhile, organisations have learned that by switching to the cloud, they gain flexibility and scalability while simultaneously cutting costs, not only benefiting their workplace, but also, the environment.

Below we present how cloud computing benefits the environment in detail.

Energy savings: An on-site data centre needs a constant power supply, a cooling system to avoid overheating. The cloud data centres infrastructure are designed to be located closer to the facilities that power them to prevent large losses during the process of transmitting electrical energy over long distances. Cloud data centres also use less wattage to provide back-up power and cooling due to superior hardware setup.

Energy efficiency: Cloud data centres are designed at scale and built for efficient energy use to achieve optimal utilisation. When hardware sits idle (the usual case in private data centres), it creates poor efficiency and has negative effects on the environment. However, cloud servers tend to be 2 to 4 times more efficient than traditional data centres due to highly utilised infrastructure by consolidating machine use.

Reduction in carbon emission: Cloud computing cuts the amount of carbon emissions by reducing energy requirement and consumption. A survey conducted by Accenture, Microsoft and WSP revealed that cloud computing that by using cloud computing, large companies can lessen per-user carbon footprint by 30% and up to 90% for small enterprises. In 2010, Salesforce, a cloud computing provider reduced carbon footprint by 170,900 tons of carbon. This figure is equivalent to eliminating 37,000 cars on the road. This also affects climate control costs, since it is much more expensive to run machines at peak performance levels in perfect temperature levels. The cloud eliminates this wasteful spending due to the use of energy efficient equipment and fewer carbon emissions.

Use of energy-efficient hardware: As the hardware in cloud data centres tends to have much higher utilisation rates than traditional servers, it will most likely have a shorter lifecycle, prompting a faster refresh time. It is also more cost efficient for cloud servers to upgrade on a regular basis because new technology brings in better energy efficiency. The more energy efficient hardware is, the drastically less energy to be used in the long run, which will save the cloud provider more money.

Use of renewable energy sources: Major IT companies, that provide cloud computing services, have switched the majority of their data centres onto renewable energy sources to power their operations. Amazon, Google, and Facebook are just a few examples who have made great efforts to be environmental-friendly and set ecological company goals.

Reduction in e-waste: Cloud computing makes a positive contribution to sustainability through dematerialisation. Dematerialisation refers to the replacement of high-carbon physical products with virtual equivalents. Cloud services encourage people to use virtual services, such as virtual machines, video streaming, as opposed to physical products. By reducing physical products, cloud computing reduces the amount of waste emanating from the disposal of these products.

Going paperless: Cloud computing helps organisations to go paperless with the help of cloud storage options like DropBox, OneDrive and Google Drive. With cloud-based technologies like DocuSign, signing documents could be done with a few clicks without printing. Also, there is no need to store paper documents, as all documents are stored safely and securely in the cloud. By going paperless, the need to dispose of documents that has a negative environmental impact is reduced.

On the software side, moving basic software applications to the cloud can save electricity immensely. Research funded by Google and conducted by Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in conjunction with Northwestern University revealed that moving business software such as email, CRM, and more (on a national scale) to the cloud would lower the total energy consumption of these software applications by 87% enough electricity to power Los Angeles for 12 months.

Research in Environmental Data Science is trans-disciplinary, where scientists and practitioners and stakeholders (from different disciplines) create data-driven solutions to environmental science’s grand challenges, often using a large amount of data along with analytical methods requiring heavy computations. While managing and processing data on a local server greatly increase carbon emissions and electricity consumption, e-infrastructure, Research Infrastructures (RIs) and Virtual Research Environments (VREs) are environmental-friendly options. e-infrastructure focuses on providing the fundamental compute, storage and networking facilities needed to support data science, and Research Infrastructures (RIs) focus on providing access to data and services based on those data to particular research communities. Virtual Research Environments (VREs) focus on supporting researchers in actually using the data, services and facilities made available by the other two kinds of infrastructure. VREs assist researchers by integrating tools for data discovery, data retrieval, workflow management and collaboration, often coupled with computing infrastructure.

In DSNE, we have been doing research into Virtual Labs as a VRE supporting environmental data scientists. Virtual Labs are cloud-based that provide a collaborative, dynamic and tailorable platform that caters for users at different levels of abstraction and support end-to-end analysis from the assimilation and analysis of data to the visualisation, interpretation and discussion of the results. While we are still enhancing Virtual Labs, methodologically enhanced virtual labs are emerging as the next crucial step to support collaborative environmental data science.

The Virtual Labs team in DSNE consists of John Watkins, Gordon Blair, Maria Salama and Michael Hollaway. We are currently offering support to ease this transition to working in Virtual Labs and if you need further help talk to Maria Salama if you have not done so already (email: m.salama@lancaster.ac.uk).

References

P. Martin, L. Remy, M. Theodoridou, K. Jeffery, and Z. Zhao, "Mapping heterogeneous research infrastructure metadata into a unified catalogue for use in a generic virtual research environment," Future Generation Computer Systems, vol. 101, pp. 1-13, 2019.

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