Purdue CIO Gerry McCartney: Green Computing A Business Necessity

July 28, 2008

Although environmental and business concerns can sometimes be in conflict, Purdue University's vice president for information technology and chief information officer says reducing energy consumption is a required strategic enterprise goal.

Gerry McCartney

"This is one case in which the goals of environmentalists and the goals of business managers are in synch," Gerry McCartney says. "In the 1990s, the biggest challenge in enterprise computing was finding enough data center space for the computers or finding qualified staff to run the equipment. The biggest challenge now is energy use."

Computers use electricity, of course, which often requires the burning of fossil fuels in power plants, contributing to greenhouse gases emissions. Computers in businesses, universities, and other enterprises are often massed in specialized data centers. These rooms, or often entire buildings, house thousands or tens of thousands of machines that host Web sites, e-mail, and other necessities of modern life, as well as multi-processor supercomputers that are used in research and development.

These facilities also require massive amounts of air conditioning year round to combat the heat generated by the circuits, which multiplies the energy use.

"If you've ever sat with your laptop on your lap while you are working at night, you know how warm that device can get," McCartney says. "Now if you can imagine a thousand machines running appreciably hotter than that chip, you'll get some appreciation of the kind of energy draw and cooling that's required to make these machines run."

McCartney doesn't foresee a single technological breakthrough in the near future that will ease energy consumption.

"I think we're going down two paths," McCartney says. "How can we make the equipment we're already using the most effective? And, are there new technologies emerging that will allow us to make a significant improvement in our efficiency?"

McCartney says for existing equipment, technology such as server virtualization and massive parallel supercomputers can help ease energy consumption.

"We're actively exploring working with a few start-up companies with interesting opportunities in high performance computing that will require work on our side to make the machines effective but will allow us the opportunity to consider significant reductions in energy use," he said. "These new technologies may require different coding and analytical skills than IT staffs have currently, but we may be able to reduce our energy consumption on these machines by as much as 80 percent."

As CIO, William "Gerry" McCartney oversees Information Technology at Purdue, which is responsible for the planning and coordination of central computing, telecommunications, media production and distance-learning services. McCartney also managed IT services for Purdue's Krannert School of Management and the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania.

McCartney earned his doctorate in sociology and anthropology from Purdue and diplomas in advanced computer programming and systems analysis from Trinity College in Dublin, Ireland.