Google doles out advice on power-consumption

If you're going to learn, you might as well learn from the best. Like most other large companies, Google is working to reduce its energy requirements and it's sharing the fruit of its labors with anyone who cares to listen. In a talk entitled "Watts, faults and other fascinating 'dirty' words computer architects can no longer afford to ignore," Google distinguished engineer Luiz Barroso discussed his company's ongoing project to curb energy usage. Barroso's advice was broken down into two areas: "Maximizing usage of available power capacity is key," and "systems are typically very power-inefficient on nonpeak conditions." "Power/energy efficiency and fault-tolerance are central to the design of large-scale computing systems today," Barroso told the audience at Google's New York offices. "And technology trends are likely to make them even more relevant in the future, increasingly affecting smaller-scale systems."

For more of Barroso's advice:
- see this eWeek article