Theme Track Developing Sustainable Technologies for an Improved Future

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Contents

Opening Remarks

Panelists: Divya Naidu Kolar Sunder (Intel Corporation), Mala Devlin (Cisco Systems), Leslie Thompson (Intel Corporation), Sudesna Dash (Sun Microsystems), Kathleen Fiehrer (Intel Corporation)

Note Taker: Eshe N Pickett

"Problems cannot be solved at the same level of awareness that created them" - Albert Einstein

Sustainability has various definitions

  • balancing financial, human and natural resources
  • Responsible use of natural resources
  • Driving wastes and inefficiency of the supply chain
  • Reducing our carbon footprint

Why are we discussing sustainability?

  • The introduction of new technologies into the marketplace will be essential
    • leverage expertise and try to solve the problem
    • fixing old issues
    • when creating new products consider what we can do better so as not to recreate problems
  • The Cycle of new product development:
    • Innovate
    • Implement
    • Manufacture
    • Consumption

Sun Microsystems

Panelist Bio

Sudesna Dash is a Circuit Design Lead at Sun Microsystems, with expertise in designing custom SRAM memories. She has a Bachelors in Electrical Engineering from the National Institute of Technology, Rourkela, India and a Masters' in EE from Stanford University in 2000. Over the last 9 years she has been with SUN, designing caches and registerfiles for various SPARC chips including the family of Niagara processors. Interdependency exists between sustainability and technology.

Opening Remarks

Innovation is bringing something new that adds value or utility. Sustainability is very important, we cannot operate as we did in the past, we must consider:

  • nonrenewable resources
  • toxins and pollutants

As technologists, we have to create new products/services that minimize the negative impact,products must have a positive/regenerative impact on the environment to be sustainable and should be at the core of all new innovations.

Example of a favorite innovation: The iPhone

  • email
  • phone
  • web browser
  • GPS
  • memo
  • numerous applications

Three Main elements of Innovation

  1. knowledge
    • lays a foundation for creativity
    • as engineers we have been given education and trained to do our jobs well.
  2. motivation
    • intellectual curiosity
    • financial incentive
    • making the planet better for future generations
  3. perspective
    • need to think "out of the box"
    • do research, go beyond current scope of work
    • read and talk to different people doing similar work

EX of innovation: Apollo astronauts couldn't write with conventional pens in space due to zero gravity

  • Problem: no gravitational pull, conventional pen did not work

2 Teams set out to solve the problem

  • Team A - cool pen that worked in 0 gravity, but very expensive
  • Team B - the pencil
    • perspective
    • sustainability

Innovative solutions are not only environmentally, but financially sustainable. Always consider the 3 Ps:

  • planet
  • people
  • profit

Innovation At Sun

Industries that adopt a sustainable approach, reduce cost and consumers want sustainable products. Become a leader in industry. Sun microsystems realized that it needed to reduce power consumption in data centers, they enabled people with funding to do research which led to innovation of the Niagara processor.

  • multiple simple cores
  • multiple jobs on multiple threads, increased the throughput, resulting in higher performance per watt

Enabling innovation sets the stage to energize intellectual capital and create products and processes that are sustainable

  • envision
  • energize
  • enable

Cisco

Panelist Bio

Mala Devlin is a Senior Software Development Manager at Cisco systems and is a Manager for development tools & methodologies to increase engineering productivity. She has been at Cisco for the last 10 years, and has worked in the areas of enabling large-scale componentized development/release models, enabling hitless software upgrades, and managing QoS (Quality of Service). Prior to Cisco, she spent 12 years at Bell Northern Research in Canada. She holds a Bachelors of Computer Engineering from McGill University in Montreal, Canada.

Opening Remarks

Leadership is critical, to enable innovation and to transform it into reality. The implementation phase is where innovation turns into reality "where the rubber hits the road" There are two fundamental factors that make it real:

  1. sponsorship
  2. funding

There is so much awareness surrounding sustainability that it is percolating into the corporate culture

  • Latest Newsweek rates the top 500 green companies
  • many companies @ Grace Hopper are green
  • Funding is more readily available for sustainable technologies when popular media increases awareness

Three Sustainable Areas During Implementation

Reduce

This is the area where there is the biggest impact in engineering projects. Documentation and code reviews no longer use paper copies, this naturally happened because of the awareness that has been created in the social fabric that has percolated to the corporate environment. It is often the case that there are very few things being printed. Technology has caught up, and collaborative technologies enable code reviewers to seamlessley make and incorporate changes.

Many projects involve taking software and delivering on a hardware platform. Large hardware equipment is very expensive in energy usage/carbon footprint. Companies benefit by coming up with ways to reduce the carbon footprint of this process. In terms of lab facilities and data centers, we have to account for space cooling, etc. for a piece of hardware. Through virtualization technology it allows for greater use of the hardware among a large group of engineers. Software simulation allows a large majority of iterations to be done on a desktop environment, which has dramatically reduced reliance on real hardware.

Reduction of carbon footprint for distributed teams through virtualization and collaboration reduces travel budgets set aside for face to face reviews. This due in part to economic reasons and the social good of reducing overall carbon footprints. A lot less travel is involved. Again collaborative technologies have made it easier to work w/distrbuted teams.

Reuse

Cicsco developed a facility called "repo depot" that accepts used hardware, refurbishes and catalogs it for reuse across the company. This enables the reuse the hardware already available instead of procuring brand new hardware.

Recycle

Many companies collect electronic waste and handle it appropriately for recycling. In the last cycle of electronic waste collection, Cisco recycled 200 metric tons of electronic waste, helping saving our landfills. 5 years ago, these measures would not have been taken into account, but the greater level of awareness has made it a consideration in planning an engineering project.

Intel

Panelist Bio

Intel Corporation (Kathleen Fiehrer)

Kathleen Fiehrer is the Climate Savers Computing Initiative Technical Program Manager with Intel's EcoTechnology Program Office. She received her BS in chemistry from Seattle University and her PhD in Physical Chemistry from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Kathleen joined Intel in 1997 as Senior Process Engineer at Intel's logic development site. She worked nine years as an environmental engineer at Intel's logic development site focusing on Intel's environmental roadmaps and setting technology environmental goals. As the program manager of CSCI's technical work groups, Kathleen drives the organization's technical work group agendas and aligns their strategies to CSCI's mission of reducing computer energy consumption through the adoption of energy efficiency products and the use of power management. In addition, Kathleen supports Intel's customers on E-waste, life-cycle analysis and EPEAT issues. She has recently joined IEEE's Design for End of Life cross product team.

Opening Remarks

2008 - 47% of energy consumption comes from renewable resources Water - spent over 100 million in last 10 on water reclamation projects Intel saves 3 billion gallons of water reclamation/year, each chip takes 10 gallons of water to produce. Putting it in perspective:

  • 1800 gallons to produce a single pair of jeans
  • 120 gallons to produce 1 egg
  • 65 gallongs to produce 1 gallon of milk

Intel strategy is aligned to reduce computer energy consumption. Manufacturing chipsets takes a lot of resources, thre are many consderations:

  • Air pollution
  • Energy
  • water
  • chemicals/chemical waste
  • solid waste
  • waste water
  • logistics and transport

One of the gretest ROIs comes from reducing the enviornmental impact of operations. Intel is commited to manufacturing a sustainable process. Intel, along with the world semiconductor council is committed to reducing global warming gasss to 1999 levels by 2010, water conusmtion to 2007 levels by 2012.Intel takes measures to reduce solid waste in the manufacturing process:

  • Sells 60k tons of unusable wafers to the solar industry
  • Taken lead out of processesors in 45nm porocess
  • Halogen free since 2008
  • In 32 nm technology, removed all halogen from both microprocessors and chipsets
  • Materials pacakging reduction
    • less shipping worldwide, reduces greenhouse gases from shipping
  • Majority of footprint comes from electricyt used during the manufacturing process

Intel can focus on product energy use to make a large impact.Moore's law states that transitor density doubles every 19-24 months, which increases performance and improves energy density of wafers, leading to a 1 million factor reduction in energy transistor over 30 years delivering great performance at lower energy. If many users adopted new rnrgy efficient technology, 40TW hours per year, a $4 billion in energy savings, equivalent to removing 30million tons of CO2 from the environment or taking 5 million cars off of the road.

Challenges:

  • Users cannot always afford, to upgrade, but they can do power management

Industry can help address the problem. Computers go into lower power consumption state when left idle - older gen computers don't use power management, a single user can save ~800kw hours/year, which could be 70Tw hours per years, or 9million cars off of the road! Notebooks are even more energy efficient than desktops, which would increase savings to 90Tw hours per year! The Climate savers computing initiative involves Google, Intel, the World Wildlife Foundation, HP, Dell, Microsoft, et al, is seeking to reduce computing energy consumption by 50% by 2010.

  • Would save 5.5 billion
  • Would reduce global CO2 by 54million tons/year

The IT Industry and Green

Recent Newsweek issue highlighting 500 green companys identified 4 of top 5 were in IT Industry, we are leaders in green. IT can use products to improve energy efficiencey in other areas although we are only 2% of all energy use worldwide we can use IT to reduce the other 98% in other industries. How?

  • Automation
    • Industrial robots
    • Example: UPS corp decided to only send drivers out on straight or right hand turn routes, using logisticis routing software to find the best routes, end result: in 4 years, Oregon saved 3/4 of 1million gallons of fuel using this technology
  • Substitition
    • Video conferencing
      • effective meetings
      • Reduce time travelling/carbon footprint
  • Demataerialization
    • Converting atoms to bits
      • mp3 players: used to have cds, records, tapes < -- now music is downloaded, no shipping costs
      • online banking: no longer using paper to print checks, no need to drive to the bank to deposit

What can we all commit to do?

  • Schools - educate future engineers
  • Abide by the principles of sustainable development when thinking about enginering designs
  • Show due regard to consequences
  • Be Aware
    • Disaster prevention should be integrated into the design
  • Professional responsibility must include awareness of the ways in which technology intereacts w/larger society

Q & A

  • Q: Can you give examples of ways we can influence sustainability
    • A: (Sun) A Campaign to Clean up the country of Estonia - 50k people cleaned up 10k tons of waste in 1 day - built a team, got people on board, influenced politicians to do ads - vision energize people, achieve great things
  • Q: The government sponsored Cash for clunkers - is there a cash for clunkers with monitors and desktop computers that can be done?
    • A: (Intel) During Intel's dev. forum, we asked the EPA's energy star specification for computers trememndous energy savings can result from that - no program like that at this time. Looking into stimulus funds to address this challenge.
  • Q: Social, environmental impact of innovations compete with interest of corproate profit, are we doomed to thinking of environment only if it can contribute to the bottom line? When designing things what happens to the innovation once it is no longer being used (innovation leads to shorter life-cycle of products, prompting more waste)?
    • A: Companies are very brand concious, very aware of being branded green, want to be part of the community, comply to the new social standards, permeating into everything that organizations are doing. we are striving for the balance of being green and doing the right thing because customers are demanding that. customers choose to buy green products, because it is the right things to do. companies have to meet demand. media reporting on these issues will put pressure on companies to strive to meet the standards as well.
    • A: Government regulations in carbon footprints also puts pressure on companies to meet these requirements. As we all work toward the common mission it becomes a requirement
    • A: (Intel) Industry is beginning ot look at labelling, there are 3 sources for labels: 1) how much CO2 does yoru company emit? 2) CO2 emitted from electricity generation to power facillities 3) what is the embedded carbon from materielas used to manufacture. There are currently no standards to idenfity step 3. How far back do you go? Copper mining to harvest materials? Environemntal labels - epeat , looks at energy, recyclability of a computer.
  • Q: Preventative measures, for technology productus - lifespan of product, decreases waste due to discarding product, what kind of ways have the companies tried to address the issue, and what other preventative issues?
    • A: (Intel) End of life attributes - epeat, end of life cycle of your computer, in addition is your computer modular, can you remove components, and reuse? Green attributes are reported on epeat. Programs are also available for buy back and refurbishment.
    • A: (Sun) Looking into product recycling - product takeback program to ensure that the product be disposed of properly at the end of it's life.
    • A: (Cisco) Our Repo depot program - hugely successful for extending the lifespan interenally, also we have a buy back program from customers.
  • Q: What steps is sun taking to not use hazardous materials, are Niagara chips setting the bar for other chips?
    • A: (Sun) Instead of going for higher performance, looking for simple cores, investigating ways to reduce leakage in chips, w/regard to components - panelist doesn't have the information, in general, in industry, all companies are trying to use less toxic material.
  • Q: Keyoto protocol was not signed because it would hurt business, would government regulation hurt or help sustainability?
    • A: (Intel) Voluntary programs such as energy star are better at forcing industry to go green as opposed to mandatory requirements.
    • A: (Cisco) It depends on what kind of industry. Companies at the top tended to be IT (Newsweek) industries toward the bottom - mining, petrol. Much bigger challenges exist for those companies, and that needs to be examined for industries that have bigger hurdles to overcome.
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