Andrew Hoffman, University of Michigan, Director, Erb Institute for Global Sustainable Enterprise

By Andrew Hoffman and Terry F. Yosie

The students of today are the business leaders of tomorrow. It’s important for them to understand how to solve the big, vexing problems that impact the quality of life for current and future generations.  

With that in mind, the University of Michigan’s Erb Institute for Global Sustainable Enterprise, together with the World Environment Center, have announced a partnership to get graduate students involved in planning and implementing sustainable development initiatives while working with leading global companies.

The program, which will be called the Erb/WEC Fellowships, will be supported by IBM as part of the company’s long-term commitment to environmental sustainability and developing next-generation skills for the 21^st century workforce. IBM was recently recognized for the second consecutive year as the greenest company in the U.S., according to the Newsweek 2012 Green Rankings survey, and the company is working with WEC and other companies to solve major sustainability challenges.

Terry F. Yosie, President and CEO, World Environment Center

The Erb/WEC Fellowships will provide practical experience to dual-degree MBA/MS students who are aiming for careers that advance sustainable development. The program adds a new dimension to both WEC’s and the Erb Institute’s expanding portfolio of initiatives to improve the teaching of sustainability at leading educational institutions.  

Erb/WEC Fellows come from a program that connects them to the best minds at the University of Michigan, which is at the forefront of advancing sustainability concepts and practices. Meanwhile the WEC, through its membership, will provide students direct access to senior level sustainability executives.  

Why now? Sustainability has migrated to the core of business strategy for global companies. It provides an operating framework and best practices to improve energy, water and resource efficiency while attending to social and economic equity. 

Sustainability reduces consumption and waste around water use and other natural resources. It’s a way to strengthen environmental, health and safety performance and drives innovation across business functions – manufacturing, product development, distribution, logistics and customer relations.  It also spurs initiatives to align global value chains.

In short, sustainability thinking has evolved to the point where it influences everything from global brand enhancement and competitive differentiation to the need for economic development in local communities and strengthened small-and-medium sized enterprises.

It’s a complex problem that can be solved only by reaching deep within organizations. Today’s students need to understand how companies evaluate and apply sustainability data to make decisions that affect the planet.

We feel that education in both business and sustainability must transcend the classroom. That includes engagement with business professionals who are on the cutting edge of the issue. This new initiative represents the spirit of that goal, with real-life learning opportunities for our students.

Click here to view the embedded video.

___________________________________________________________________

Terry F. Yosie is President and CEO of the World Environment Center; Andrew J.  Hoffman is Director, Erb Institute and Holcim (US) Professor of Sustainable Enterprise
Ross School of Business/School of Natural Resources and Environment, University of Michigan

Technorati Tags: environmental, Green & Beyond, IBM, smarter collaboration, Smarter Planet, sustainability, University of Michigan, WEC

Recently, IBM detailed two new computers that will help change the way the world, literally, works.

The first, Sequoia, is the world’s most powerful supercomputer, capable of calculating in one hour what would otherwise take 6.7 billion people using hand calculators 320 years to complete if they worked non-stop. It is installed at the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA)’s Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California.

The second is the first commercial machine, cooled by hot water, built for the Leibniz Supercomputing Centre in Germany. It will be used by scientists across Europe to drive a wide range of research ­­− from simulating the blood flow behind an artificial heart valve, to devising quieter aeroplanes.

What’s impressive about these machines is not just their massive processing power alone, but  they are remarkably energy efficient, too.

For example, while Sequoia is more than one and a half times faster than its nearest competitor, it is almost two and a half times more energy efficient. Meanwhile, the water-cooled Leibniz machine consumes 40 percent less energy than traditional air-cooled versions. Since water is able to remove heat 4,000 times more efficiently than air, hot water is an innovative means to more efficiently cool computers than the conventional approach based on chilled water. It also allows energy to be captured from the system and reused to heat the buildings during winter. These advances afford potential energy savings of around 1 million euros per year.

Not all large-scale supercomputers need to be quite as powerful as these two. However, across Europe hundreds of machines are used to run essential daily tasks in the numerous data centers that power many of the government and commercial systems we take for granted.

As a result, information and communication technology already consumes 8 to 10 percent of the EU’s electricity and by 2020 that figure may double. Data centers in Western Europe alone consume up to 100 billion kilowatt hours a year. That’s more or less the total electricity consumption of the Netherlands.

That’s why the European Commission has created a Code of Conduct to encourage all data center operators to reduce energy consumption in a cost-effective manner. The guidance provides a set of best practices.

In May 2012, the European Union Code of Conduct for Datacenters pronounced IBM the Corporate Participant winner for 2012. Dr. Paolo Bertoldi, Principal Administrator at the European Commission Joint Research Centre in charge of research activities on energy efficiency policy, praised IBM for its systematic approach and for achieving results in a large number of data centers.

It’s the latest in a line of environmental awards since IBM announced its first corporate policy on environmental affairs in 1971.

What does IBM do to maintain its energy efficiency leadership in its data centers? Older hardware equipment is continually upgraded while industry-leading server consolidation and virtualization techniques are also employed to help ensure computers run at optimal capacity.

Analytics plays a crucial role too: Mobile Measurement Technology (MMT), developed by IBM Research, instruments the data centers with thousands of sensors to record and analyze temperatures and air flow to detect hot and cold spots. By providing energy flow insight in real-time, MMT provides the intelligence to enable more efficient cooling.

In an increasingly instrumented and interconnected world, the amount of data the world is producing is growing exponentially; we reckon there will be around 44 times as much data and content over the next decade as there is today.

Gaining insight and intelligence from all that data will largely be the job of the world’s supercomputers and that will take a great deal of processing and energy power. We’ll continue to work tirelessly on increasing the first while systematically reducing the second.

Technorati Tags: IBM, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Leibniz Supercomputing Centre, Sequoia

The ‘chasm’ is defined as the gap between what it takes for early adopters to adopt a new technology versus what it takes for the early majority to buy into it.  Moore believes visionaries and pragmatists have very different expectations, and he attempts to explore those differences and suggest techniques to successfully cross the “chasm.”

A similar ‘chasm’  exists in the area of sustainability for companies trying to transition from early adopter (stick your toe in the water) projects to successfully planning, executing and achieving sustainability goals.   A recent study by TRIRIGA, a recent IBM Smarter Buildings acquisition, finds that although 92 percent of the world’s largest corporations and government agencies have set environmental and energy reduction goals, two–thirds failed to achieve them.  While a majority of organizations have yet to achieve their goals, one-third demonstrate that it is possible. What did these organizations do to cross that chasm?

TRIRIGA evaluated survey data from 130 sustainability–focused executives and professionals, all from companies and agencies with revenues or operating budget greater than $1 billion, and found that  75 percent of organizations that achieved their environmental and energy management goals invested in three clear activities:

·    91% improve facility energy efficiency,
·    77% improve equipment servicing and maintenance, and
·    75% improve space utilization (i.e. space optimization)

This serves as a great indicator where to begin and how to prioritize activities.   But there are other factors to be considered.

A sustainability program, like most strategic initiatives, is much more likely to succeed with strong executive management support from its first stages and with specific resources dedicated to its implementation.  Involving executive management in all stages of the strategy with regular reviews and celebration of milestones is key to crossing this ‘chasm.’

Establishing sustainability as a top priority within real estate and facilities is  fundamental to success. Real estate and facility assets consume more than 77 percent of electricity and consume 49 percent of total energy according to the US Energy Information Administration.  They are also responsible for approximately 48 percent of global carbon emissions and research identifies that buildings have the highest growth in CO2 emissions since 1960. Research from McKinsey also finds that they provide the greatest opportunity for reduction at the lowest cost – they are the low-hanging fruit of sustainability. Based on these staggering statistics, there was little surprise that companies crossing this chasm placed a high priority on sustainability within real estate and facilities.

To learn more about the strategies and tactics used by leading organizations to achieve their sustainability goals,  join our webcast “Crossing the Sustainability Chasm” on Wednesday, September 14th at 10:00AM PST  which will include the following content:

·    Best practice examples on achieving energy management & environmental goals
·    How IBM achieved more than $29 million in energy cost savings in 2010

Click to register: and you can also look for the webcast replay option following the event.

There’s no shortage of contests for tech startups in this world, but IBM’s SmartCamp is different. The focus is on companies that aim to make the world work better, and is aligned with our Smarter Planet agenda. We launched the program last year in Dublin and conducted regional contests this spring and summer in Stockholm, Boston, Tel Aviv, London, and Silicon Valley. (This video tells the Silicon Valley story.) There are still two contests left, in Paris on Sept. 24 and Copenhagen on Oct. 7, before the finals in Dublin on Nov. 16. So there’s time for entrepreneurs to get involved. Check it out at www.ibm.com/ie/smarterplanet/smartcamp.

Technorati Tags: IBM, smartcamp, Smarter Planet

Energy efficiency is quickly becoming one of the most important metrics of supercomputing value. Just a few short years ago high performance computing (HPC) clients were concerned primarily with performance, and the cost of performance. The conversation has shifted dramatically. HPC clients are now equally concerned about power consumption and cooling requirements. For good reason, the cost to power an HPC environment today is nearly as much as the hardware.

Fifty percent of the energy consumed in today’s average data center goes toward cooling the systems and preventing overheating. Overheating, in turn, leads to reduced reliability. In fact, Wu-Chun Feng of Virginia Tech, one of the founders of the Green500 List of energy-efficient supercomputers believes that for every 10 degree Celsius increase in temperature the system failure rate doubles.

Significance of the Green500 List

All of this makes the Green500 List of the world’s most energy efficient supercomputers even more compelling, since it clearly calls out which companies are taking supercomputing innovation to the next level. The Green500 List is published by Green500.org and provides a ranking of the most energy-efficient supercomputers in the world. The most current Green500 list published in July reported that 17 of the 20 most energy efficient supercomputers in the world are from IBM. The number one system on the Green500 list is a three way tie between IBM QPACE systems in Germany based on the IBM PowerXCell 8i processor. These top three IBM systems each produce more than 773 Mflops (millions of floating point operations per second) per watt of energy.

IBM developers made energy efficiency a core design principle for HPC systems long ago. For example, when IBM introduced the BlueGene/P supercomputer, it more than doubled the performance of its BlueGene/L predecessor, but only consumed a little more power. The engineering focus on performance per watt is what makes IBM supercomputers the most efficient and consequently, the most affordable. Clients who need to deploy petascale performance systems can save one million dollars a year in energy costs by using IBM’s BlueGene/P, because it is over 40 percent more energy efficient than comparable supercomputers.

IBM recently delivered a first-of-a-kind water-cooled supercomputer to the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich (ETH Zurich) that consumes up to 40 percent less energy than a comparable air-cooled machine and decreases the carbon footprint of the system by up to 85 percent. The supercomputer, called Aquasar, is made up of water-cooled IBM BladeCenter servers, achieves a performance of six teraflops and has an energy efficiency of about 450 megaflops per watt.

IBM and Arctur, one of Slovenia’s leading software developers, recently announced an agreement to build one of the most powerful supercomputers in the region. Arctur will allow mid-market companies to lease time on the IBM System x iDataPlex high performance cloud computer and help reduce product development time by up to 75 percent. The iDataPlex platform maximizes performance per watt with innovative cooling techniques such as the IBM Rear Door Heat eXchanger. A single iDataPlex 2U server packs five times the computer power of a typical server while consuming 40 percent less power.

As the HPC community pushes toward exascale computing (the performance of one million trillion calculations per second), the energy efficiency design challenges are much greater than the transition from teraflop to petaflop. In previous supercomputing performance generations, the transition was primarily centered on processor development. If current technology design was deployed in exascale computing, such a system would consume between 100 and 200 megawatts (the equivalent energy of a small power plant) and come with a prohibitive power bill of more than $100 million per year.

Most HPC developers agree that an exascale system should only consume about 20 megawatts, which means getting to a 1000-fold increase in performance with only a 10-fold increase in power consumption. IBM is well on its way in research and development to create the next generation of systems that can achieve an exaflop of performance with acceptable levels of power consumption. The formula is a combination of processors, systems level architecture and software.

The global benefits of supercomputing are extraordinary, from pharmaceutical and genetic research to assessing financial risk with pinpoint accuracy or modeling the effects of climate change over the course of a century. Yet all of this work hinges on the ability to balance supercomputing capability with energy efficiency. Now, more than ever, supercomputing performance and power consumption must be developed and implemented with an equal measure of importance.

Dave Turek is vice president of Deep Computing for IBM.

IBM just issued its 20th environmental report–an annual tradition that began in 1990, long before most companies climbed on the “green” bandwagon or became transparent about their environmental activities.   In addition to climate change and energy efficiency, IBM reports on pollution prevention, waste management, material selection and water stewardship to capture the full scope of its environmental impact.

In 2009, IBM’s energy conservation projects across the company delivered savings equal to 5.4 percent of our total energy use (exceeding our goal of 3.5%). These conservation projects also saved almost $27 million in energy expense.

From the way IBM runs its business, to the products and solutions we sell, to the way we manage our supplier relationships, IBM uses its expertise, global reach, innovation and technology in our commitment to protect the environment.  Sustainability is systemic to IBM’s business along with technology and services that promote the company’s vision for a smarter planet.

The company looks to design energy-efficient offerings to help provide clients with products that protect the environment. Consider data centers. Toyota Motor’s 20, 000 square foot data in California uses a high-tech system of sensors developed by IBM to detect wasted energy on the manufacturing floor. The sensors deliver a color-coded 3D view of where heat is being produced.  This same system helped IBM cut its 2009 energy consumption and has saved nearly 350,000 tons of carbon dioxide emissions for clients.

IBM is partnering with companies around the world on thermal management, virtualization, consolidation, software, and even construction to improve data center energy efficiency. And the Green500 just put out its 2010 list of the most energy efficient supercomputers; IBM dominates the list with 17 of the top 20.

Our sustainability also stretches to the realm of patents. The Eco-Patent Commons creates a free exchange of intellectual property to solve environmental challenges. Since the World Business Council for Sustainable Development and IBM launched the Eco-Patent Commons in 2008, 12 companies have joined the effort, contributing more than 100 patents to protect the environment, and we strongly encourage other companies to contribute.

For some companies, corporate responsibility is merely an adjunct; a set of activities disconnected from the core business. At IBM, the company’s strategic business priorities are tightly aligned with our social responsibility efforts. This shared ambition is to enable the systems that make life on this planet more efficient, accessible and sustainable.

Wayne Balta is vice president, environmental affairs and product safety, IBM