GreenIT Solutions

MercData can help with your current or future solutions to become more ‘Green’. The government and the world as a whole have begun to implement standards and regulations that encourage green computing. With the current emphasize on businesses becoming energy efficient an important area is the software solutions themselves.

MercData’s ‘Green IT specialty’ can help your current and future solutions be more efficient by optimizing how programs are written thereby enhancing speed, functionality and user-satisfaction while cutting down on CPU energy and operating costs producing a lower carbon footprint.

Computers, which include CPUs and memory, having become increasingly more powerful and cheaper over the past few decades creating a ‘brute force’ mentality when it comes to computer programming. This ‘brute force’ approach is not conducive to Green IT and consumes massive amounts of space and in some cases is not 100% optimized for speed. The two most important software measureable metrics that can affect the carbon footprint of an application are speed and space (memory).

MercData can show you how energy and money can be saved, time to process completion optimized and greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions reduced by re-writing older and less efficient computer programs.

How MercData can contribute to your Green IT.

Algorithmic efficiency
The efficiency of algorithms has an impact on the amount of computer resources required for any given computing function and there are many efficiency trade-offs in writing programs. As computers have become more numerous and the cost of hardware has declined relative to the cost of energy, the energy efficiency and environmental impact of computing systems and programs has received increased attention.

MercData’s algorithmic efficiency solutions can reduce carbon footprints through optimization.
Algorithmic efficiency = thermodynamic efficiency = reduced carbon footprint

Algorithm efficiency can be improved through numerous techniques including but not limited to:
Loop Optimization
Multithreading analysis
Speculative execution
Even the reordering of nested conditional statements

Power Management
Power management allows a solution to control the power-saving aspect of its underlying hardware. The solution should be aware and able to turn off components such as monitors, hard drives and etc. after set periods of inactivity or at the solutions discretion. In addition a solution should be able to hibernate the underlying components, such as the CPU, Ram and possible external connected devices when not needed.

Optimized power management not only decreases the carbon footprint but also increases system stability through lower power consumption which equals lower heat dissipation.

MercData looks at the solution as a whole to optimize the power management in current and future solutions.

Resource Allocation
Within a solution it may be possible to dynamically distribute resources as needed. One technique to be considered is automatic scheduling. Another technique to consider is CPU time slicing is this justified for the solution at hand. Another rate-based resource allocation.

Terminal servers
Can the solution be optimized to reduce redundant processing? If a solution has many parts or processes that are doing the same task it may be possible to have the solution act as a terminal server where ‘clients’ of the main application connect to handoff there respective task and act as ‘thin client’ where the redundant tasks are processed by a ‘central’ unit. This model can reduce the energy consumption up to 1/8th the amount of normal non-centralized systems.

MercData’s engineering expertise includes other program related efficiencies that are easily and logically linked to sustainability, improved efficiency, user-friendliness and cost-savings.

Contact MercData today see how we can help you with your Green IT needs.