CANARIE announces Green IT project winners

An alliance of leading information and communications technology (ICT) firms, universities and international partners is the big winner of a Green IT competition held by CANARIE. The Green Star Network — led by École de technologie supérieure — has been awarded $2 million to develop a groundbreaking Internet in which network nodes will be powered entirely by wind and solar power. The project aims to develop low-carbon technologies including virtualization, carbon quantification procedures and tools to control ICT's carbon footprint. It's estimated that the global ICT produces carbon emissions equal to the output of the entire aviation industry and is the fastest growing source of carbon emissions in the world. CANARIE's Green IT pilot project also made three smaller awards: $163,000 for a joint project between McGill Univ and Univ of California San Diego to design an ultra-efficient data centre for high-performance computing applications; $100,000 to the Winnipeg-based International Institute for Sustainable Development to study the business case and carbon-offset potential for Canadian universities to use CANARIE's network to run IT operations from remote, zero-carbon data centre facilities; and, $119,000 to the Univ of British Columbia's Centre for Sustainability and Social Innovation to develop a business case for using carbon offsets to finance data centre relocations….