Published on the 13/07/2010 | Written by Newsdesk

The internet’s energy consumption is growing fast. It may need computers to help it sleep if it’s not to pose a green threat…

It’s a hungry beast and, like a child, is growing rapidly. The internet presently only accounts for two-to-three percent of world energy consumption, but its appetite is growing and, like a growing toddler, may have to have naps, overseen by nanny computers, to keep consumption at bay.

Melbourne’s Swinburne Centre of Advanced Internet Architectures (CAIA) is looking at how to improve the internet’s efficiency and lessen its environmental impact.

“On any given day the amount of energy used to power Facebook pages, recipe searches, news sites and all that the internet entails is roughly the same as that used by the aviation industry – estimated to be as much as 20 or 30 Gigawatts,” said CAIA Associate Professor Lachlan Andrew.

He said our attitude to the rate of growth needs to change.

“We simply can’t keep increasing our activity because the rate at which we use one of our most basic raw materials (oil) is going to have to decline.”

Andrew is being funded by an Australian Research Council Future Fellowship for the next four years to investigate how to improve the internet’s efficiency and examine what effect this will have on its performance.

Computers can already slow down the rate at which they process information to save energy, but this is usually only done in an ad hoc fashion, says Andrew.

Along with Caltech’s Dr Adam Wierman, Andrew is looking at manipulating the mechanism within computers that controls processing speed to make PCs’ energy use more efficient, while still completing work in a reasonable time.

He’s also planning to examine what effect putting the computers used in commercial peer-to-peer file sharing networks to sleep for periods of time will have on both energy consumption and network performance.

There are also plans to look at the effect imposing naps on some router switches will have on internet energy consumption.

“The point of the research is not necessarily to encourage more people to adopt the most energy efficient way of processing, but to make them more aware of the trade-offs that are involved,” said Andrew.

“If you want to be putting a lot of emphasis on going fast, then you will use this much more energy. If you want to put the emphasis on saving energy then you will run this much slower.”