Blog action day – the new opportunity for Intel in addressing climate change

Addressing climate change is not something new for us. But how we are now looking at the issue is.

As a company, Intel has taken steps to measure and reduce the carbon footprint of our operations for many years now. We’ve been publicly reporting our greenhouse gas emissions, both in our annual CSR report and through the Carbon Disclosure Project, which recently recognized us in their 2009 Carbon Disclosure Leadership Index. We’ve invested millions of dollars in energy efficiency and resource conservation projects throughout our global operations and we took the step in 2008 to become the largest purchaser of green power in the U.S. according to the EPA, with the goal of hopefully stimulating the market for renewable energy over the long-term.

But today, we are spending more time looking at our products as well. Over the past few years, we’ve focused on also continuing to reduce the carbon footprint of our products, committing ourselves to being the leader in energy efficient performance. We’re already seeing results of this shift – we estimate that between 2006 and 2008, products based on the Intel® Coreâ„¢ microarchitecture-including desktop, notebook, and server computers-used 20 terawatt hours less electricity than products powered by our previous-generation architecture would have. What’s 20 terawatts? Roughly equivalent to the energy savings associated with averting 15 million tons of energy-related CO2 emissions or removing 3 million cars from the road.

But the second piece of this is even more interesting – how our products and technology can be applied across other sectors of the economy to reduce emissions and environmental impact. For Intel, and others in our industry, there is great potential for our technology to play a role in reducing environmental impact and addressing climate change. Think of all of the industries that have traditionally underinvested in technology – how investing in technology can make them more energy efficient and help them reduce their impact. To get a picture of the opportunity here – check out the Smart2020 report as well as a recent blog post highlighting new academic research on the potential in this space.

What goes without saying is that significant collaboration will be required in order to fully realize this opportunity – so we’ve reached out to other companies and organizations to help advance the discussion. To take part in the discussion and see what Intel and other companies doing, also check out the blog for the Digital Energy Solutions Campaign which Intel has co-sponsored to explore how new technologies can be applied to improve energy efficiency.

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ECSS 2009: Challenges and Opportunities in Informatics

This year, 80 of the leading CS faculties, department chairs research institutes in Europe gathered in a humid Paris for the European Computer Science conference to delve into the new role Informatics should play among the sciences. Put forward this year was the need for a multidisciplinary approach uniting research, curricula as well as education.

The several keynotes of this first day of conference addressed different aspects of the matter. While Mark Harris opened the conference with a keynote on ¡¥The Role of Informatics on Addressing the big Global Challenges¡¨, he stressed the importance of an all-rounder, well trained IT specialist, able to take on a much-needed leadership role in the field. He pointed out to the need for multi-disciplinary training in order to produce graduates who are both generalists and specialists as the only answer to fill the leadership gap inherent to the field of ICT at the moment. The talk raised quite a few questions, particularly salient seemed to be the issue that a lot of faculty are either not aware of the multi-core ¡¥tsunami¡¦ coming their way or don¡¦t know how to tackle it.

After him, European Commission Head of strategy for ICT Research and Innovation, Khalil Rouhana, then presented the EU strategy for ICT research and innovation, explained the gaps of private & public sector investments in the EU compared to the US. Proportionally, companies invest much less in ICT R&D in EU member states compared to the US but more surprisingly the EU public sector invests even less (60% lower). He linked it to the fragmentation of markets present in the EU where a lack of a single European market for innovative ICT, a fragmented public demand as well as R&D investments explain in great part these shortcomings. Luckily, 3 new initiatives in private-public partnerships around the fields of energy efficient buildings, energy efficient factories and green cars have recently been put in place by the EU to remedy this.

Wendy Hall- ACM President- closed the keynotes in beauty with an expose of her study of the Web and its evolution. One of her conclusions highlights nicely the central issue of the conference; computer science is a relatively new discipline which is still working through some of its issues and trying to come to terms with its identity; while it had a huge impact on society, it is still taught in a very boring or limited way in schools, underestimated by public spending and in dire need of leadership. But these challenges are also loaded with opportunities such as parallelism, multi-disciplinary approaches, etc…will they be taken advantage of?

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Ten Ways to Improve J2EE Application Performance on Multi-Core Systems

Software scalability has been a big issue recently.  While modern servers are incredibly fast, many software solutions simply are not able to take advantage of it.  There are many reasons for this.  Some are easy to address and some require changes to the software.  Intel performance engineer and Oracle WebLogic performance engineer will jointly give a talk at Oracle OpenWorld on this topic.

Here is the session information:

ID#: S309892

Title: Ten Ways to Improve J2EE Application Performance on Multi-Core Systems

Track: Oracle Develop: Enterprise Java and Oracle WebLogic

Date: 13-OCT-09

Time: 17:30 – 18:30

Venue: Hilton Hotel, Room: Yosemite B

Here is the abstract:

The current economic environment and the new focus on being green demand greater efficiency from every IT shop, big and small alike. In this session, you will learn how to improve Java application scalability by using Oracle WebLogic Server on the latest multi-core systems. It examines various software and hardware features for getting the best performance out of your applications. In particular, it explores the pros and cons of 32-bit versus 64-bit environments and how having multiple Java virtual machine instances can reduce heap pressure and improve cache locality. It also discusses operating system and hardware features such as large pages and solid-state drives and their impacts on J2EE application performance.

As a bonus, we will be giving away a Netbook at the end of the talk.

We also wrote a technical paper on the topics that will be covered in this talk.  You can find this technical paper at http://software.intel.com/en-us/articles/java-application-server-optimization-for-multi-core-systems/ .

URL: http://communities.intel.com/community/openportit/server/blog/2009/10/09/ten-ways-to-improve-j2ee-application-performance-on-multi-core-systems