What as meant by green computing?

Question

What as meant by green computing?

Answer 1

Computers require lots of plastic, nickel, lead, and lots of other goodies that require petrochemicals or smelting processes and are often toxic to the environment.

The only "Green" computer is the one beween your ears.

Answer 2

Computer manufacturers are trying to do what they can to help.  I work for an internet security firm that makes firewalls and anti-malware software.  We have A LOT of servers and computers.  

A lot of servers that we can get now, have quad core processors, what that means is that you can buy a physical processor that has 4 logical processors on them.  That's only one physical processor creating heat, so you don't have to now cool the data center as much.  If you have a room of about 1,000 servers, you have to power those servers and you have to keep those servers cool.  The more physical processors the hotter they run, the more cooling you need.

By reducing the number of physical processors, yet still getting the same processing power, you're essentially saving power by cooling less.  

Also, some of the power supplies on a blade chassis, whether there are 4 or 6 or 8, are 'smart'.  Say you've only got 6 of the 16 servers in your blade running, you don't need all 8 of the power supplies running and drawing power, so the blade chassis is now 'smart enough' to know that it only needs 3 of the power supplies running, using less electricity.

There is also a product out there called VMWare, it allows you to virtualize servers.   You have a server that is pretty beefy with disk space, processors and memory.  That server is the host for virtual servers, anywhere from 4 to 24 servers for a host.  Those virtual servers share the same physical memory, the same physical processors, and the same physical disk.  All managed through something called the hypervisor.  It sounds really complicated, but it's not really. It is very cool!!!   Anyways, the beauty part is you have ONE physical server that his hosting 4 to 24 virtual servers.  So you only have to power that one physical server, saving the power and cooling that 3-23 servers would take.

Did that make sense...?  From an IT standpoint we try to do what we can, I know we've made a lot of changes in the last year to go 'Green'.

A lot of the computer/server manufacturers will have a section on green computing too...  Just look them up in Yahoo.  HP, Dell, Gateway, IBM, etc...

Answer 3

Many answers may site energy conservation, but for me green computing means saving trees think about it all the e-paper flying around and not a single tree cut down. This will also help with global warming more trees less co2.