AMD Contributes to Solar and Wind-Powered Data Centers

Solar and wind power may not be easy to harness for day to day activities and consumer electronics, but larger installations can definitely benefit from them, something that AMD seems quite certain of, considering its most recent announcement.

The past years have seen quite a few advancements as far as harnessing sources of renewable energy goes.

Said sources are the sun and the wind, and while it is unlikely that solar panels will become mainstream accessories any time soon, they have still shown up on such things as laptops.

Nonetheless, there are those industrial applications that do not need to concern themselves with compactness and whatever else.

As such, one could say that things like data centers are the ideal place to test means of harnessing solar and wind energy.

To this end, AMD, along with HP, Clarkson University and the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority (NYSERDA), have entered a partnership.

Their goal is to channel renewable energy to such data centers directly, as well as study how to automatically shift a compute load between data centers in order to maintain reliability, what with solar and wind-derived energy being intermittent.

“The distributed computing model of the cloud parallels the distributed power-generation model of solar and wind energy. Directing power to data centers from these emerging renewable energy resources without relying on a large-scale, traditional electrical grid is a key challenge,” said Alan Lee, corporate vice president of Research and Advanced Development, AMD.

“One ultimate goal is the co-location of dynamic energy sources with dynamic computing resources to improve the economics, performance, and environmental benefits of both infrastructures.”

There is, unfortunately, no way to know for sure how long it will take before anything practical is devised, though one can expect solar cells, at least, to evolve in effectiveness by that point.