What is Green Computing?



Overview of green computing

“Greening” means making your computing equipment a low risk way for your business to not only help the environment but also help to reduce cost. Currently this concept is one of the largest growing trends.

Making the proper decision to go Green in the workplace, such as offices, not only improves the net profit of your business, but also reduces the carbon footprint. Reducing energy usage also reduces carbon dioxide emissions and your energy bill is the most effective thing you can do.

Why go Green?

There are some basic reasons to go Green.

Climate Change

Savings


Reliability of power

Computing

Origins of Green computing


Approaches to Green computing


Virtualisation

Computer virtualisation is the process of running two or more logical computer systems in one set of physical hardware.



Power management



Power supply
Storage

There are three routes available, all vary in cost, performance and capacity. For example, desktop hard drive, laptop hard drive, solid state drive.



Desktop hard drive Laptop hard drive Solid state drive


Video card

Displays

LCD monitors typically use a cold-cathode fluorescent bulb to provide light for the display. Some newer displays use an array of Light Emitting Diodes (LEDs) instead of a fluorescent bulb that reduces the amount of electricity used by the display. LCD monitors electricity three times less when active and ten times less when in sleep mode.


CRT Display LCD Display LED Display


Materials recycling


Goals of green computing


Pathways to green computing

To comprehensively and effectively address the environmental impacts of computing/IT, we must adopt a holistic approach and make the entire IT life cycle greener by addressing environmental sustainability along the four following complementary paths:
  • Green use
Intelligent use of energy and information systems. Reducing the energy consumption of computers and other information systems as well as using them in an environmentally sound manner.

  • Green disposal
Reduction of waste, reuse and refurbishment of hardware and recycling of out of use peripherals and other items. Refurbishing and reusing of old computers and properly recycling of unwanted computers and other electronics equipment.
  • Green design
Efficient design of data centres and workstations. Designing energy- efficient and environmentally sound components, computers, servers, cooling equipment and data centres.
  • Green manufacturing
Informed purchasing of components, peripherals and equipment manufactured with the environment in mind. Manufacturing electronic components, computers and other associated subsystems with minimal impact on the environment.

Recent implementation of Green computing
  • Blackle
Blackle is a search engine site powered by Google custom search. It came into being based on the concept that when a computer screen is white, presenting an empty web page or Google home page, your computer consumes 74W. When the screen is black it consumes only 59W.



  • Zonbu computer
  • Fit-PC


  • Sun Ray thin client


  • Asus Eee PC and Ultra portables

Future of Green computing



Advantages



Disadvantages


Conclusion
  • So far consumers haven't cared about the ecological impact when buying computers, they have only cared about speed and price.
  • New Green materials are developed every year and many toxic ones are already replaced by them.
  • The greenest computer will not miraculously fall from the sky one day, it will be the product of years of improvement.
  • The features of a green computer of tomorrow would be like; efficiency, manufacturing and materials, recyclability, server model, self-powering and other trends.