Pallab’s Place

At the Cadence CDNLive press room there was a press targeted panel titled “Green Power, Smart Power, and the Next Generation of IT�.  The panel was moderated by John Blyler EIC of Chip Design Magazine, and the panelists were: Ted Vucurevich of Cadence, Nikhil Jayaram of Cisco, Dr. J. Antonio Carballo of IBM Venture Capital Group, Dr. Jan Rabaey of UC Berkeley, and Carl Guardino of the Silicon Valley Leadership Group (SVLG).

John introduced the subject of the panel by defining the scope of green power as it pertained to this panel.  The understanding was low power and power use efficiency has always been a criteria of design, just not one of top constraints.  Now, the shift has been made to address eco-friendly design which is a multi-domain, multi-sector, full design chain for both the component creation (IC) and the electronic system that uses the component.

The panelists discussed the background on the importance of “greening� the designs and the energy analysis focus on the IT portion.  Cadence indicated that it is a supply chain issue and the key was the identification and optimization of “energy productivity� which is a measure of useful power.

Cisco focused the discussions on the datacenter portion of the IT infrastructure as the energy target.  Nikhil identified that highest concentration of power use in the IT environment was the datacenters, and that most large installation now have an OPEX that exceed the CAPEX for these datacenters.  This places power as a high priority for a number of system applications.

IBM Venture Capital has been doing a lot of work in China and North America for the IT space.  The China market has 100% of it new design wins having a full identified energy efficiency target and power utilization form factor.  From an energy management perspective, the mobile marketplace is a “standby energy� market rather than an “active energy� market, and thus does not really enter into the full environment impact discussions as do the datacenters.  At this time, they are seeing over $1BUSD being spent for “green computing�, and growing.

Dr Rabaey made the connection that the base issues have been around for a long time and significant progress has been made, even with his own research, since the 1980’s.  The key to addressing and handling the energy efficiency issues is to quantify the use model through sensors to drive data collection and analysis.  This will provide the basis to develop deterministic models for energy use corrolated to activities of the equipment and then optimization techniques can be developed and applied.  This concept was referred to as a “societal information technology networkâ€?.

Carl started his discussion with the observation that when David Packard started the SVLG over 30 years ago, one of the key issues was energy use.  The eco-system for IT in both centralized and distributed implementations, is a system that is beyond on the scope of full modeling for engineering optimization at this time.  The need for this optimization and the driving factor on energy efficiencies of these datacenters is they currently consume 1.5% of the total energy used in the US and it is growing.  The solution to this problem and the reduction of energy use is going to have to be a collaborative task from members of the whole supply chain in the IT datacenter market.

The panel discussed aspects of the problem and summarized the panel with the observation that the solution was a multi-domain solution covering electrical / mechanical / thermal / and software related issues.  The consensus of the panelists was that the solution path the most immediate and supportable solutions would be a hardware based solution rather than a software solution.  This hardware would be deterministic in design and the use optimization would be provided by targeted application specific software.

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