Now, I’ve beefed more than once about the power consumption of Nakamotoan cryptocurrencies. Bitcoin, in particular, is designed to waste electricity, burning power is the trick pony that makes Bitcoin work. Specifically, miners are paid to burn electricity. So, as Bitcoin grows, it has become a major resource hog, with little justification.
But, to be fair, digital technology, and the Internet in general, are huge resource hogs. It’s so bad that even the biggest winners (Amazon, Google, et al) are working hard to control and green up their resource usage. When mega-capitalists think their own consumption is out of hand, you know it’s really out of hand.
One of the responses to this challenge is to use green energy for major server farms, along with routing and scheduling techniques to try to optimize power use and use green energy as much as possible.
This spring researchers at NYU discuss another variant of this concept: a “solar protocol” [1]. The idea is to have a global network of replicated solar powered internet servers, so that at least some copies are fully powered at any time. When you try to connect to the server the packets are routed to a server with lots of power. I.e., where the sun is shining.
They have built a prototype server to illustrate the point. The web page lets you know which copy you have connected to, so you can observe the way the web page follows the sun.
It kind of works, so that’s neat.
Now, I have to say I’ve seen plenty of variations of this idea, especially at the beginnings of the Internet when loads were low and bandwidth expensive. For example, there were early protocols to locate nearby servers (for better latency) or cheaper links (when connections were through commercial telephone links). For that matter, early variations of intranets and even firewalls acted as caches to reduce latency for far away or slow servers, with protocols to try to use cached copies when possible. (This was before streaming was the main thing.)
And, of course, we’ve been building solar powered computing nodes since there were nerds. I mean, if you are going to go to the trouble of booting up your own Linux cluster at home, you may as well put up some battery backed solar to help power it. And lot’s of remote weather stations and the like. are basically solar-powered web sites. So, yeah, that’s a thing.
I have to say that the NYU work is a lot farther along than DYI fiddling and remote weather stations.
Still, it’s not clear just how much impact this can have on the real world. By now, the Internet isn’t really about connecting to individual servers, it’s about connection to huge server farms. Which are already replicated and in many cases have their own solar generating capacity.
But it’s a neat demo. Give ’em an ‘A’.
- Tega Brain, Benedetta Piantella, and Alex Nathanson, Could the internet be driven by climate-friendly “natural intelligence”?, in NYU News, March 15, 2022. https://engineering.nyu.edu/news/could-internet-be-driven-climate-friendly-natural-intelligence-global-network-solar-powered
Robert McGrath's Blog 