We would like to keep you up to date with the latest news from Digitalisation World by sending you push notifications.
Digital Newsletter
Each week our editor Phil Alsop rounds up the most popular articles, videos and expert opinions. We compile this into a Digital Newsletter and send it straight to your inbox every week.
Digital Magazines
We'll let you know each time a new edition of Digitalisation World is released so that you're always kept up-to-date with the latest and greatest news and press releases.
Video Magazines
The Digitalisation World Video magazine contains the latest Zoom interviews with experts in the industry.
The company’s latest advancement in sustainability, developed by a small team of engineers, is a new carbon-intelligent computing platform. Google designed and deployed this first-of-its kind system for its hyperscale data centres to shift the timing of many compute tasks to when low-carbon power sources, like wind and solar, are most plentiful. This is done without additional computer hardware and without impacting the performance of Google services like Search, Maps and YouTube that people rely on around the clock. Shifting the timing of non-urgent compute tasks—like creating new filter features on Google Photos, YouTube video processing, or adding new words to Google Translate—helps reduce the electrical grid’s carbon footprint, getting us closer to 24x7 carbon-free energy.
Each day, at every Google data centre, the carbon-intelligent platform compares two types of forecasts for the following day. One of the forecasts, provided by partner Tomorrow, predicts how the average hourly carbon intensity of the local electrical grid will change over the course of a day. A complementary Google internal forecast predicts the hourly power resources that a data centre needs to carry out its compute tasks during the same period. Google uses the two forecasts to optimise hour-by-hour guidelines to align compute tasks with times of low-carbon electricity supply. Early results demonstrate carbon-aware load shifting works. Results from the pilot suggest that by shifting compute jobs Google can increase the amount of lower-carbon energy it consumes.
The first version of this carbon-intelligent computing platform focuses on shifting tasks to different times of the day, within the same data centre. But, it’s also possible to move flexible compute tasks between different data centres, so that more work is completed when and where doing so is more environmentally friendly. Google’s plan for the future is to shift load in both time and location to maximise the reduction in grid-level CO2 emissions.
