- Menu
-
- English
Views: 47 Author: Site Editor Publish Time: 2022-04-07 Origin: Site
Significant efficiency gains mean that the data center industry's power demand grew by just 6 percent in the time it took for computing loads to jump by 550 percent. The study, conducted by Northwestern University, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and Koomey Analytics, was published in the journal Science on Feb. 28.
The researchers used data from a variety of sources to construct a landscape of data center energy consumption, including information on data center equipment inventories, efficiency trends and market structure. The resulting models allow for detailed analysis of data center equipment (such as servers, storage devices and cooling systems), types of data centers (including hyperscale data centers and cloud computing) and energy used by region around the world.
The researchers said that energy efficiency improvements outpaced other major industries, meaning that data centers are considered to account for 1 percent of global energy use.
The study criticizes the "oft-cited but oversimplified analysis" that claims global data center energy use has doubled in the past decade and will triple or even quadruple in the next decade. The study notes, "However, such extrapolations based on recent service demand growth metrics ignore the strong offsetting energy efficiency trends that are occurring at the same time."
This research paper estimates global data center energy use at 153 TWh in 2005, 194 TWh by 2010, and 203 TWh in 2018.
But between 2010 and 2018, global data center workloads and computing instances increased six-fold, global Internet Protocol (IP) traffic in data centers increased more than ten-fold, and data center storage capacity increased an estimated 25-fold.
Looking ahead, the researchers note the difficulty of predicting the future, but say that improvements in increased levels of server virtualization, the shift to low-power storage, and the shift in architecture from small to compact, from inefficient data centers to hyperscale data center facilities, should ensure sufficient energy-efficient resources to operate another doubling of data center computing instances in the future, while at the same time, global data center energy consumption increases negligibly."
