The sustainable information technology ecosystem

The information technology industry, and consumers of the products and services stemming from the industry, has benefited from rapidly increasing computational performance for all classes of devices over the past several decades. With increased performance, the industry has also experienced a sharp increase in device-level energy consumption and power density. These trends are expected to result in a decline of fully passive thermal management solutions in favor of active solutions. However, fully active solutions will further tax energy resources and are therefore not in the best interest of the IT industry nor the consumer. In this paper, we postulate that the management of available energy as a key resource throughout the IT ecosystem, from hand held devices through data centers, will be a requirement from an economic and sustainability standpoint. We propose that hybrid active-passive solutions with rich sensor networks and multi-tiered management systems that can be scaled across the ecosystem, are required to meet future power dissipation needs while also addressing sustainability concerns. The paper will provide such examples that will span the IT spectrum and consider both the supply side and the demand side aspects of the proposed solutions.