February, 2010

Analysis / Brainstorming / cloud / Geek / General / Ideas — No Comments
18
Feb 10

Carbon Computing

Being able to outsource all of your computing needs to an external provider is absolutely fantastic for developers and some businesses. While not running your own infrastructure is much cheaper, it also makes the amount of energy and associated ‘costs’ of computing very opaque.

There are quite a few issues with the transparency of costs in the cloud computing space. This includes no transparency into the cost of electricity, and where that electricity is coming from. To date, there is no public database of electricity markets, datacenters, and hosting providers which lists how much carbon per kWh of electricity is being output. In ICT this is a massive issue, because of the sheer amount of energy our industry consumes.

“Information and Communication Technology (ICT) is both a problem and a potential solution in the war against climate change. Currently, computers are responsible for more greenhouse gas emissions than airlines. Greenhouse gas is growing exponentially and we expect that ICT will produce double the emissions of the airline industry within five years with no end in site. ICT can provide a solution to climate change by reducing carbon emmission in the world through telecommuting and other means.”

Here in British Columbia we get most of our electricity from renewable hydro-electric power. Hydro-Electric is one of the lowest forms of reliable low carbon output electricity generation available. It goes without saying that providing computing services using energy generated this way would mean less CO2 / kWh but also less CO2 per compute cycle.

We need several things to make this happen

1) Start measuring how much power ICT is using on a per server / component basis
2) Develop resources that track carbon output per kWh in different states & provinces and provide that information as a service
3) Determine where your computing resources are located and track on a per machine level the amount of carbon being output
4) Calculate how much carbon you’re using.

Those are pretty audacious goals, but I think we really need to start keeping track of carbon output for power. By tying that into the different services we use on a regular basis, we can make carbon part of the social and actual cost of using services. Hopefully that will help buy us enough time and money to develop the carbon neutral power solutions we desperately need.

General — 1 Comment
18
Feb 10

The Gates Equation

Bill Gates’ TED talk went online today and I agree with Alex Steffen that it’s the most important climate talk of the year (and will be for the rest of 2010). Nothing is more important to the security of our planet than reducing our carbon output, and the best way to do that is to significantly ramp up investment in innovative energy companies. The best part of the talk is The Gates Equation which does an excellent job showing how we have to reduce and eliminate our CO2 emissions. For more of an explanation on The Gates Equation check out the WorldChanging post.


Providing Carbon Neutral energy is the holy grail, not only for the planet but for its inhabitants. Cheap, carbon neutral energy is the only way to sustain our economies, lift people out of poverty and continue our whole ‘civilization’ experiment.

Development / Geek / General / howto / sysadmin — 1 Comment
12
Feb 10

Unfuddle Git Backups – How to Actually Use Them

I really like Unfuddle. The service is easy to use, and there are a lot of great features in there. The documentation is… lacking, however.

One of the things I like is the ability to get a full backup of all my project data, repositories, etc in a single tarball. You can even ask them to keep a copy in your own S3 account.

To create a backup do the following

1) log into Unfuddle and goto the Project page.
2) Click the ‘settings’ tab then
3) Scroll down till you see link that says ‘Request a backup of this project now’ link. Click it.

In a few moments you’ll get an email, and you’ll see a new link on the right hand side of your project settings page that includes a timestamped backup. This backup is a tarball that contains all the GIT repositories and some other files like a backup.xml file which looks like all your tickets.

To use the git dumps run the following

mkdir reponame
cd reponame
git init
git fast-import < ../my-unfuddle-backup.git.dmp
git checkout master

You’re done!

If you’re using subversion repositories there is documentation on how to use these repo backups on Unfuddles website.