Spotlight on Green Schools
Schools are focusing more and more heavily on cutting back on the energy they use and trying to reduce their impact on the environment. The articles on these pages spotlight individual campus energy conservation programs, energy initiatives, solar installations, energy-related technology, HVAC, research, grants, policy, and other topics related to green campuses.
Most desktop computers today, when not in use, power down their hard drives to save energy. While this may be very green, it also incurs minor, though sometimes frustrating, delays. Waiting up to eight seconds for a hard drive to power back up to fetch some document is not the best use of any office worker's time. So two University of Arizona researchers have sussed out a way to save energy and keep data coming quickly, through a concept they call context-aware prefetching.
Organizations have the desire to reduce their impact on the environment but lack the will to pay a premium for cleaner operations, according to a cross-sector survey released recently by IT hosting solutions provider Rackspace.
Data collection technology provider Vernier Software & Technology has announced several new offerings for the education market, including free Logger Lite and LabQuest Emulator software, a new NXT sensor adapter for Lego Mindstorms NXT robots, and free eco-friendly classroom activities.
A new supercomputer installed at Purdue University in West Lafayette, IN is being compared to a "fleet of thousands of bike messengers." Individually they don't carry much freight, but they use less energy and are more effective in some situations. At least, that's the hope. Gerry McCartney, vice president for IT and CIO at Purdue, said the supercomputer, a SiCortex 5832, uses one-fortieth the power of traditional supercomputers.
Buildings on the Allegheny College campus will be audited by Siemens Building Technologies to identify potential energy savings as part of the school's participation in the Clinton Climate Initiative's (CCI) Energy Efficiency Building Retrofit Program.
How green are your feet? That's the question IBM wants to answer as it launches a new consulting service to determine the carbon footprint of IT organizations and help those organizations plan for greener operations throughout and beyond the enterprise.
The High Performance Computing Center North (HPC2N), a Swedish consortium of universities and research centers based out of Umea University, is installing a supercomputer that combines IBM Cell Broadband Engines and Power processors with quad-core Intel Xeon processors running both Windows and Linux in a dual-boot configuration.
iLinc released a new version of its Web conferencing tool, iLinc 10, which bolsters session management and adds a "green meter." The green meter shows cost savings, carbon emissions, and total distance not traveled by using Web conferencing versus in-person meetings. Administrators can also customize several variables in the meter to match their organization's specific policies.
Dartmouth College's recently completed McLaughlin Cluster residence halls have been recognized by the United States Green Building Council for its environmental sustainability, winning Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design ( LEED ) gold certifications. The recognition makes the fifth LEED certification for Dartmouth buildings in four months. LEED certifications were recently awarded to two other residence halls as well as two academic facilities.
Although IT budgets are expected to grow in 2008 overall, about a fourth of CIOs in the United States reported decreases in their budgets in the first quarter of 2008, according to a survey released by Gartner this month and highlighted at the Gartner Symposium/ITxpo: Emerging Trends event this week in Las Vegas.
GenevaLogic this week released an update to Print-Limit Pro, the company's system for managing the use of printers in K-12 schools and higher education. The new version 8.0 adds native support for Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard and includes expanded management and administrative functionality.
In the mixed computing environments common on university campuses, supporting multiple operating systems and myriad hardware configurations can be a nightmare for IT. In the past, one solution has been to go with a single platform. Great for IT. Not so great for users. But at Bemidji State University in Minnesota, they've come up with another solution....
Today’s Auxiliary Services department has morphed
into a solution source for mobile transactions,
mountains of junk mail, and a whole lot more.
Here are some interesting facts you may not know: U.S. colleges and universities spend nearly $2 billion each year on energy, according to the federal government. And the Department of Energy (DOE) estimates that the average PC wastes up to 400 kilowatt-hours of electricity per year simply by running at full power when no user is present.
