of electrical engineering personnel to measure the power used before and after the BIOS changes were installed. The power consumption differences were measured on three different scales, namely on 11 individual computers, on one wing of the fourth floor, and the entire building.
by the plastic casing of computer hardware. It also provides a window into the invisible world of electricity-consuming circuit boards and gives us a way to understand our own environmental impact when using computers. It presents a way to observe how a small personal change can amount to huge gains, and it allows us to refute the internal voice that asks “I’m just one person—what can I do?” It allows us to see how simple individual acts aggregate into significant wholes.
November + December 2009
interactions
Once the technical changes were made on the computers in the SOE, we hoped that the power savings would automatically begin to accrue. Nonetheless, we recognized that such changes do not come without potential problems, the most notable being resistance to change. Even the minor delays associated with waking a computer could be bothersome enough to some folks to prompt complaints to high-level university officials and reverse the support of administrators in the department. With that in mind, we knew that we had to find ways to engage people.
The IT professionals in the SOE were asked to test how running virus scans and OS patching during the day would affect performance for end users. This changed decades of standard operating procedures and support methods in which such software traditionally runs at night.
In order to engage the faculty and staff at the SOE, we created standard mass emails to inform people about the changes, provide methods for reporting problems, and distribute instructions for looking up frequently asked questions. Most important, we realized this need for information about sustainable practices was an opportunity to create a more interactive solution. In response to this opportunity, we created the GoGreen sidebar gadget. Once someone installs the gadget as a desktop application, it begins reporting the exact amount of carbon dioxide that is not leaking into the atmosphere by virtue of his or her participation in the power-management test run. It also shows how much CO2 has been saved in the entire School of Education and at the university overall. The gadget sends all of this information back to a central database where we can gather data about the impact of our project. Finally, it has a link to more facts about sustainable computing.
The gadget is a mechanism of awareness and motivation that provides a means of gathering and dispensing information. The gadget provides a form of interaction, which exposes the energy consumption that would otherwise be obscured
Technical Results. At Indiana University, we pay a very low 3. 5 cents per kilowatt-hour. Even so, the month-long experiment indicated that we could save an average of just under $22 ($21.95, to be exact) per machine, per year by setting them up to enter deep-sleep mode after two hours and 15 minutes. Clearly, more aggressive power settings could accrue even higher savings. Even at the $22 rate, multiplied across the more than 32,700 computers on our campuses, the university could save more than $719,000 per year. From an environmental perspective, each computer with the new settings would save approximately 0.61 metric tons of carbon dioxide, for a grand total of 19,947 tons. That is like taking 3,314 passenger vehicles off the road. It is the same amount of CO2 as is created by consuming more than two million gallons of gasoline or the emissions from the electricity use of 2,510 homes for one year [ 1].
Human Results. IT staff adjusted well to the new patch and upgrade routine, indicating that the need for such maintenance to occur on machines in the middle of the night was a habit worth changing. Overall, faculty and staff were very patient with the changes, and several people mentioned that the savings were worth the minor inconveniences associated with being the first department on campus to make such changes. Of the 229 IT problems reported during the test period, only 29 were related to the project. Most of these were caused by network equipment problems. During the one-month run, 107 people installed the GoGreen gadget on their computers, amounting to more than a quarter of the participants.
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