Talking About Green

[At the PROMPT workshop on “Next Generation Internet to Reduce Global Warming” researchers from Barcelona, Amsterdam, Ottawa and Chicago demonstrated the world’s first “follow the sun/follow the wind” Internet and computational grid where routing and computational nodes of HPDMnet, sitting on top of an optical infrastructure provided by GLIF, SURFnet, CANARIE, i2CAT, STAR LIGHT were rapidly relocated around the world simulating the availability of renewable energy sources at these nodes. The researchers demonstrated that virtual machines and logical routers (and associated network topologies) could be quickly moved within a matter of seconds (or minutes if storage also had to be relocated), which is well within the turbine spin down cycle of windmills and the diurnal power curve of solar panels.

Although the story that Internet was originally designed to survive a nuclear war may not be true, the Internet does have the inherent capability to survive a far more serious crisis facing this planet – global warming. The same applies to cyber-infrastructure facilities such as computational grids. As the demand for renewable energy grows because of proposed cap and trade systems in the US and elsewhere, those industry sectors that can use low cost renewable energy sources, “in situ”, as opposed to being connected to the electrical grid will be well positioned to dominate the new zero carbon economy.

The advent of 1000G wavelengths next year and the adoption of many of the UCLP principles by companies like CISCO with their new XR router IOS (based on another Ottawa company’s real time OS-QNX) will allow deployment of global articulated private networks (APNs) using logical routers, which will further enable a future Internet whose nodes can be entirely operated with renewable power facilities that are independent of the electrical grid. Internet routing protocols and network configuration tools like UCLP (Argia) used in combination with logical routers and virtual computers will allow for the rapid re-configuration of virtual networks and distributed computing based on the local availability of renewable power.

In the coming year more nodes of the HPDMnet network will be powered solely by windmills or solar panels. Researchers from around the world are more than welcome to participate in this exciting initiative.

Congratulations to Mathieu Lemay and his colleagues at i2Cat, UoAmsterdam, CRC, iCAIR, PROMPT, SURFnet and CANARIE for this successful demo.

For more details on “follow the sun/follow the wind” project please see
Www.greenngi.com

For information on HPDMnet please
http://www.hpdmnet.net/

For information on PROMPT’s Next Generation Internet to Reduce Global Warming please see
http://www.promptinc.org/documents/NGI_release_en_v2.pdf
http://www.promptinc.org/index_en.html