Green IT is catching on these days. Although most ‘green’ IT products have been based on hardware innovations, here’s an innovation that adds a tinge of green at the software level too.

Thanks to an increasing awareness about the environment, a number of companies are looking to go ‘green’ by cutting down on harmful emissions and on processes that damage the planet. And it is not just conventional hardware factories—those featured by the media billowing large volumes of smoke—that are part of the green wave. Tech firms, too, have jumped on to the green bandwagon.

If that surprises you, then consider the fact that modern IT systems are not just complex and sophisticated, but also energy-guzzlers. Rajesh Chhabra, director, Enterprise Computing (India), Altair Engineering, explains: “It is easy to understand that the more powerful the system, the more watts it requires to be up and running. But the same system requires to be supported by elaborate energy-consuming cooling systems to remove the heat generated by the processors, as excess heat could lead to malfunctioning. Statistics indicate that every watt required for computing power creates the need for another watt for cooling! This translates into high electricity bills. Since one of the initiatives of green IT involves the reduction of power needs (see box), it (reducing power consumption) thus emerges as a win-win situation for both an organisation as well as the environment.”

The green side of high performance computing

The issue of power consumption is only compounded when it comes to high performance computing (HPC) or high-throughput computing, based on a cluster of CPUs that make up the system or a sole supercomputer. HPC is the foundation of what is called extreme computing, i.e., the application of high-end computing power in technical and scientific realms. But power consumption for computing and cooling systems are only two of the issues confronting HPC. Floor space problems, high third-party software costs, scalability of applications on a multi-node system, growing cluster complexity, and storage and data management are other problems associated with HPC.

In fact, {quotes}as far as energy is concerned, experts estimate that 20 per cent of the costs associated with running an HPC system are attributed to its power consumption. Hence, energy-saving mechanisms can play a crucial role in lowering the operational costs of HPC centres.{/quotes}

Turning down the power and going green

This situation has made hardware vendors devise low power consuming chips and components, and smarter (read ‘intelligent’) hardware that auto shuts down when it detects no consumption (of the particular resource), so as to reduce the power consumption of data centres.

But there is a limit to how far hardware can go to reduce an organisation’s energy bill and carbon footprint. As Chhabra observes, “In spite of the fact that the auto shutdown of hardware is getting more sophisticated, these components still do not have the intelligence to detect a need for resources and hence, automatically turn the systems on again. It is just not possible to detect the exact workload in order to auto switch on devices when needed at the hardware level. Hence, there arises a need for a software solution that manages hardware resources and, in the process, saves power.”

In order to tackle this problem and pave the way towards environment-friendly, energy-efficient HPC, Altair Engineering’s PBS (Personal Batch System) GridWorks division came up with its first energy-saving initiative using intelligence at the software level. PBS Professional—a software suite comprising, PBS Professional and other software—enables on-demand computing and helps enterprises maximise their performance and improve the ROI of their IT assets through grid computing technology and services.