A recent article on the CO2 cost of spam, 17 million tons of the stuff apparently, and a conversation I had with a friend about the economic advantages of parallel processing systems made me think about how technologies such as Silverlight, Ajax and Flash can act to reduce the carbon emissions associated with internet operations.
You see, traditional internet systems, web pages and the like, are a "projected user interface" that really exists on the server and are constantly refreshed whenever we select another link or move to another part of the web application. If we think about the operations taking place here, we see that the server is sending out masses of data that is often duplicated. A web-page refresh from a dynamic site for example, sends the whole HTML data stream to the client each time. A click of the refresh button may not seem expensive but when we factor in the cost of transporting that information across thousands of miles of cable, the electrical burden becomes significant.
So, why might Silverlight save the world? Well, by making a large percentage of the intelligence of a web application reside on the client PC, the data burden is reduced over the network. Rather than re-sending all the HTML information for the pages the data is reduced to the necessary information such as data from web-services. Less data means less current to the data centers and less power for the network infrastructure.
You see, traditional internet systems, web pages and the like, are a "projected user interface" that really exists on the server and are constantly refreshed whenever we select another link or move to another part of the web application. If we think about the operations taking place here, we see that the server is sending out masses of data that is often duplicated. A web-page refresh from a dynamic site for example, sends the whole HTML data stream to the client each time. A click of the refresh button may not seem expensive but when we factor in the cost of transporting that information across thousands of miles of cable, the electrical burden becomes significant.
So, why might Silverlight save the world? Well, by making a large percentage of the intelligence of a web application reside on the client PC, the data burden is reduced over the network. Rather than re-sending all the HTML information for the pages the data is reduced to the necessary information such as data from web-services. Less data means less current to the data centers and less power for the network infrastructure.
No comments:
Post a Comment