Army looks to industry to reduce computer energy consumption.

• Author: Magnuson, Stew
• Position: Battlefield Power

* When it comes to computing, there are two kinds of power.

One is the speed of a processor and how fast it can crunch ones and zeros.

Less talked about is just regular "power," the amount of energy it takes to keep a machine or servers running.

As the demand for information technology increases, servers and other equipment are being pushed closer to battle zones, and being housed in remote, or temporary bases.

"Most of the data centers in theater, whether they are at battalion headquarters or a base camp, are being run off of generators," said Tom Simmons, area vice president, public sector at Citrix Systems Inc., an information technology company that works with the military.

"We can't continue to put more and more servers and more and more storage in these battlefield data centers. We just can't keep up [with the energy requirements]," he said.

The Army, along with the information technology companies that serve it, are looking at ways to reduce the energy footprint of data centers.

"The Army continues to pursue analyses and demonstrations to guide its efforts to balance computing performance, reliability and energy use to support its operations," Richard Kidd, deputy assistant secretary of the Army for energy and sustainability, said in an email.

Kidd said the Army is applying lessons learned in Iraq to directly address the energy needs of data centers and individual computers. In Iraq, regional data hubs were created, he said.

One of the main problems is cooling the systems. Computers and servers produce heat. Central processing units, CPUs, for example, are the most sensitive and important part of a computer, but they can become warm enough to cause burns if handled. If they become too hot, their speeds can slow down. The result is less efficient computer processing, or the system can crash.

Afghanistan and Iraq in the summer only ups the ante, and forward operating bases must use more fuel to run the air conditioners that keep the machines at reasonable temperatures.

Kidd said concentrating data centers in regional hubs in Iraq made them easier to sustain and reduced the number of personnel required to operate them. The hubs were located where adequate data bandwidth via satellite communications was available.

"The long-term trend has been toward providing 'thin-client' solutions for users which push computing functions--again, closely related to energy consumption--back to servers that can be located elsewhere to save energy," Kidd...