About this episode
Host Chris Adams and guest Romain Jacob delve into the often-overlooked energy demands of networking infrastructure to discover A Greener Internet that Sleeps More. While AI and data centers usually dominate the conversation, networking still consumes significant power, comparable to the energy usage of entire countries. They discuss innovative practices to make the internet greener, such as putting networks to sleep during low usage periods and extending the life of hardware. Romain talks about his recent Hypnos paper, which won Best Paper at HotCarbon 2024. He shares his team’s award-winning research on how energy demand for networking kit powering the internet can be reduced by simply by powering down links when not in use.Learn more about our people:Chris Adams: LinkedIn | GitHub | WebsiteRomain Jacob: LinkedIn | WebsiteFind out more about the GSF:The Green Software Foundation Website Sign up to the Green Software Foundation NewsletterResources:SCION Architecture [11:30]Environmental Impacts of Internet Technology (eimpact) [17:15]Why we should be intentional about the mental models we use for thinking when we think about digital sustainability | Chris Adams [18:30] A Sleep Study for ISP Networks: Evaluating Link Sleeping on Real World Data | Romain Jacob, Lukas Röllin and Laurent Vanbever [18:59]Network energy use not directly proportional to data volume: The power model approach for more reliable network energy consumption calculations | David Mytton [38:55]Co2.js - The Issue | The Green Web Foundation [42:57]Rethinking Allocation in High-Baseload Systems: A Demand-Proportional Network Electricity Intensity Metric — University of Bristol | Daniel Schien [43:53]
