Luiz Barroso: Video & Presentation

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Google spends lots of money on electricity use in their data centers, so they invest heavily making their data centers more efficient. For example, 0.2 grams of carbon is released in the energy used for answering one Google query, compared to 20 grams of carbon for using a laptop for one hour. Energy savings could be halved by changing settings in data centers to make it so if no work being processed, no power in being consumed; if some work is being processed, only use some power, instead of full power all the time. Another solution is to remove the large room of backup batteries in data centers and replace it with a simple 12-V battery on each individual server. Many of energy efficient electronic technologies used in data centers were developed for the mobile world and adapted to the large scale centers. The computing energy footprint is no longer negligible.