The basis of sustainable computing is to look at these three factors and figure out how we can optimize them. At Internet of Everything, we have developed Eden with these design patterns fully in mind.
By doing initial computing on edge clusters at data sources, the Eden system can take refined information for next-level computing instead of moving full sets of raw data. Refined information that can then be additionally refined at different parts of the system to achieve the results needed in a non-wasteful way, limiting the need for moving data, optimization of computing by decentralization, and limiting the need for data storage by data refinement.
Centralized data centers consume a lot of energy, produce a lot of carbon emissions, and cause significant electronic waste. While data centers are seeing a positive trend towards using green energy, an even more sustainable approach is to cut unnecessary data traffic to a cloud provider, central computation and storage as much as possible by shifting computation to the edge where Eden resides and uses the power of already deployed devices.
Sustainability includes cost, as a costly system will be harder to sustain over the years they are to be active, the first reason to think sustainable is cost.
Huge centralized data centers (cloud computing) have become a critical part of the infrastructure of our digitized societies. These large central cloud data centers produce a lot of carbon emissions, electric and electronic waste. The share of global electricity used by data centers is already estimated to be around 3% and data centers generate 2% of worldwide CO2 emissions (on par with the aviation industry).
54% of which are caused by the cloud data centers of the big hyperscalers (Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Alibaba Cloud). On top of this, providing and maintaining cloud infrastructure (manufacturing, shipping of hardware, buildings, and lines) also consumes a huge amount of greenhouse gasses and produces a lot of abnormal waste (e.g. toxic coolants) at the end of life.
While until recently 90 percent of enterprise data was sent to the cloud, this number could be changing rapidly with technologies like Eden.
In Eden, most of the data will be stored and used locally, on a cluster of devices where it was created. We call this Clustered Edge Computing. Eden devices need the same technology stack (just in a much smaller format) as a cloud server. This means: an operating system, a data storage / persistence layer (data-lakes), a networking layer, and security functionalities that run efficiently on restricted hardware.
So in one way Eden is an enhanced Operating System for clustered edge devices and sustainable computing, on the other hand, it is a full service platform for running decentralized ultra-efficient digital solutions.
