Fun fact: data centers account for 1.2% of American electricity usage. Finding more energy efficient data center architectures is a big deal that a lot of resources are devoted to. Even a small improvement can result in large energy and money savings.
"A study by the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, released last month, found that the power consumption of data centres doubled between 2000 and 2005, and now accounts for 1.2% of American electricity consumption, though other estimates put the figure at 4%."
There's a few professors here at UCSD that are interested in low-power computing and data center architecture. The statistic was sited in a talk by Prof. Tajana Rosing that I attended earlier this week.
There's one guy here that is working on ways to integrate flash with the system memory; he thinks he can reduce power usage by something like 40% in a data center setting.
Moreover, this could result in a revolution in computing. If only we could have memory fast as RAM and non-volatile as Flash, everyone would use it and it would simplyfy computing a lot.
Well, flash in its current form is better at certain tasks than either hard disks or RAM. Hard disks are big, cheap, and slow. RAM is expensive, power hungry, and fast. If I remember correctly, flash is faster than a hard disk, more energy efficient than either, and way cheaper than RAM. I'm not sure of the implementation details, but you could apparently make a system better on all three axes of performance, cost, and energy usage by mixing in flash.
