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Can computing clean up its act?
The industry consumes as much electricity as Britain
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Data centres are expected to account for 4 per cent of global electricity consumption by 2020.
PHOTO ILLUSTRATION: PIXABAY
The Economist
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“What you notice first is how silent it is,” says Dr Kimmo Koski, the boss of the Finnish IT Centre for Science. Dr Koski is describing Lumi – Finnish for “snow” – the most powerful supercomputer in Europe, which sits 250km south of the Arctic Circle in the town of Kajaani in Finland.
Lumi, which was inaugurated last year, is used for everything from climate modelling to searching for new drugs. It has tens of thousands of individual processors and is capable of performing up to 429 quadrillion calculations every second. That makes it the third-most powerful supercomputer in the world. Powered by hydroelectricity, and with its waste heat used to help warm homes in Kajaani, it even boasts negative emissions of carbon dioxide.
