Industry urged to share grid facilities to save energy

Enterprise should take cues from academia, says Intellect

Businesses and industries should work together and share grid computing facilities to reduce the carbon footprint generated by IT, says supplier body Intellect.

Grid computing involves the networking of machines in various locations to create a virtual infrastructure powered by unused processing cycles, reducing power consumption and making systems more efficient.

Ian Osborne, Intellect project director of the Department of Trade and Industry’s knowledge sharing network Grid Computing Now, says the technology is already proving beneficial.

‘Grids are being used for numerous applications, from speeding up aircraft design, to managing vast amounts of health data and attempts to crack protons,’ he said. ‘The next agenda is how to harness this more generally in enterprise rather than rely on separate clusters.’

Grid computing has its roots in academic research, and Osborne says industry must follow the example of academia.

‘The automotive industry is already asking for access to all of its suppliers’ computing resources so they can do big simulation modelling jobs overnight and get a huge amount of raw computing power. More of this would help to stabilise IT’s carbon footprint,’ he said.

Jeremy Beale, head of ebusiness at the CBI, says as business processes evolve, grid computing becomes more practical.

‘As companies are having to share data increasingly on supply chain information, so they can plan logistics and delivery better, and will need to be able to have the capacity to share computing facilities,’ he said.

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