IMA's Rain Garden

While green slips into our wardrobe only once a year here, it is at the top of our minds every day. Here’s just a sampling of all the ways the IMA thinks green:

• Recycling – In 2009 the IMA recycled 7,392 pounds of newspaper, 12,950 pounds of office paper, 2,099 pounds of aluminum, and 2,046 pounds of plastic. Each employee has a recycling bin at his or her desk and large recycling bins are available in areas available to the public and staff.

• The Toby – During the renovation of The Toby in 2008, the IMA used green products whenever possible. The floor is made of recycled cork and tires. Recycled carpet tiles were used in the lobby, seating areas and hallways. Recycled glass and concrete was used for the countertops in the service area.

• Rain Garden – The IMA’s rain garden (see image above) captures and filters storm water runoff from the asphalt parking lot outside the Greenhouse that would otherwise flow into nearby waterways, carrying oil and other pollutants with it. Next time you visit the Greenhouse, be sure to check it out!

• Visitors Pavilion at 100 Acres: The Virginia B. Fairbanks Art & Nature Park – Currently being constructed and opening June 20, 2010, the 3,000-square-foot Visitors Pavilion will be a LEED certified facility.  See images of the ongoing construction of the pavilion.

• Programming – The Planet Indy speaker series – an annual speaker series that addresses quality of life from a sustainable, creative perspective.  Last month the IMA hosted filmmaker Chris Paine (director of Who Killed the Electric Car?) as he discussed transportation and green lifestyles.  As part of the event, the museum exhibited an electric car just outside Nourish Cafe (check out the IMA TV clip).Upcoming Planet Indy talks include “gestalt gardener” Felder Rushing (April 22) and author of The Not So Big House series, Sarah Susanka (May 20)

So there it is, just a few examples of how the IMA is green in honor of St. Patrick’s Day.

Slainte!

by Marcin Wichary on Flickr

Many people have heard some version of “Moore’s Law” – that the number of transistors on a chip approximately doubles every two years. This study reveals a related trend in energy consumption per computation.

There are some details to consider, of course. For starters, it helps to know that everything a computer does is broken down into individual arithmetic operations. When talking about how buff a supercomputer is, for example, we talk about the number of floating point operations it can do per second (today they run upwards of one million billion operations – what we call Peta-flops). This study doesn’t take modern supercomputers into account, but the researchers note that today’s supercomputers are made up of clusters of individual processors, some of which they did measure.

Now, your computer isn’t always working to it’s full potential. When it does, it typically doesn’t respond well to user interaction (like when you start all of your apps in the morning). So to perform the measurements, the researchers had to keep the processors busy for the period during which they measured energy consumption. They also disabled the displays on the laptops that they measured to put them on equal footing with the other computers.

In addition to these modern measurements, the researchers incorporated historical power consumption data from some of the original vacuum tube supercomputers and other earlier computer models that aren’t available today. The methods used in these prior studies varied, but the graph resulting from this aggregate study shows a remarkably clear trend:

J. Koomey et al., "Assessing Trends in the Electrical Efficiency of Computation over Time", Submitted to IEEE Annals of the History of Computing: August 5, 2009, http://www.greenercomputing.com, Dec 12, 2009

The vertical axis here is logarithmic and labeled in scientific notation. For those unfamiliar, the number after the + sign corresponds to the power of ten, so 1.E+01 means 10, 1.E+03 means 1000, and so on. Each horizontal line represents a ten-fold increase over the line below.

Note that the early vacuum tube computers operated at less than a Mega-flop per kilowatt hour. These machines could perform ten thousand calculations using the same amount of energy as a 100 Watt lightbulb left on for an hour. You can see a jump in efficiency as transistors and integrated circuits replaced vacuum tubes around 1960. And as we have packed more and more computational power into the same amount of space on a microchip, the distance that electrons have had to travel without doing useful computation has steadily been reduced, roughly doubling the number of calculations that could be done with the same amount of energy every 18 months (very similar to the trend in speed that we’re familiar with). So, although your laptop can’t do a Peta-flop in a second, it can do it using only about 1KWh of electricity – a billion times more efficiently than those vacuum tube supercomputers (although we should note that manufacturing cost is not factored in). This is the power of exponential growth.

And according to a recent interview with Lorie Wigle of Intel, while this trend continues into the future, manufacturers will be looking at additional ways to improve the efficiency of information technology, from power supply design to power management via the operating system. Hopefully this will be combined with higher rates of e-Waste recycling, leading to more sustainable computing practices.

The annual award presented by the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) since 1994, recognizes institutions for outstanding social, educational, environmental, or economic contributions to their communities. According to IMLS Director Anne-Imelda M. Radice, the IMA was selected for the award based on the Museum’s “exemplary programs (that) respond to community challenges, positively impact people’s lives, and serve as models for the nation’s museums.”

National Medal for Museum and Library Service

While the award recognizes the collective contributions of the entire museum, I wanted to share just a few of the programs cited.

• FREE GENERAL ADMISSION

• VIEWFINDERS, a program of the IMA’s School & Teacher Programs Department that serves more than 9,000 third grade students annually from Indianapolis Public Schools and other school districts. Free family memberships are given to all Viewfinders participants.

• IMA ACCESSIBILITY, including partnerships with the Indiana School for the Deaf and the Indiana School for the Blind, captioning on all IMA-produced video, large print text available in the Museum galleries, and assistant listening, accessible seating, and signing interpretation in Tobias Theater.

• ENVIRONMENTAL LEADERSHIP, including the museum’s green design initiatives and ENERGY STAR award for energy efficiency – the first ever to be awarded to a museum.

• ONLINE INITIATIVES, including ArtBabble.org, an online community of 19 (and growing) partner organizations created to showcase art-based video content.

Thank you, thank you to all those who helped to make this award possible. If Senator Lugar or the staff of the IMLS were here, I’d give them a big hug. IMA colleagues – Get ready, because I’m gonna be a high fiven’ machine today!

Congrats, ya’ll!

Read more in today’s Indianapolis Star.

One of the racks in our machine room

While perhaps not as impressive as the grocery store-size aisles of a supercomputer like the Earth Simulator (which was recently rated as the world’s most computationally-effficient supercomputer), our servers do suck their share of power. The two most significant energy inputs to this system are the cooling unit and the UPS (uninterruptible power supply).

Imagine your hair blowing in an arctic wind

Just a few hundred pounds of batteries

We have a system that monitors the power used by both the UPS and the cooling unit, and we’ve been performing measurements since February. Recently, we added a routine that calculates daily consumption for the current month. The plan is to put this information on the IMA Dashboard, and we’re using this opportunity to try out Google Charts.

Current IT power consumption for July

One of the key survival tools for anyone on the quest for sustainability is measurement. From the data we have here, it appears that we have a baseline of about 1300kWh per day. Knowing this, when we swap out hardware in the future we will be able to determine how much of an improvement we actually make, as opposed to relying on theoretical figures.

Of course, we’d like to be confident that our measurements are correct. In order to do this, we’re using Kill-A-Watt devices to measure power input on individual components in the rack. If the measurements are correct, the total power calculated from sampling individual units should be approximately equal to the power measured by the monitoring system. If not, we’ll have some investigating to do.

Tapping into a couple servers

Tapping into the main line

Hopefully, our measurements will validate and we’ll soon have live data up on the Dashboard. Until then, check out some other fancy energy usage dashboards.