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Palo Alto, CA (OBBeC) - HP has announced new research initiatives from HP Labs aimed at developing new technologies and business models that leave a lighter carbon footprint.
Initially, HP Labs will focus its research in sustainability on three major projects, including: an  initiative to reduce the carbon footprint of data centres by 75 percent;  research to replace copper wiring in servers with laser light beams; and tools for measuring and managing the amount of energy used to develop products.

According to the announcement, sustainability is one of five major research themes of the newly redesigned HP Labs, which recently refocused its efforts to address the most complex challenges facing technology customers in the next decade.

The first Sustainable Data Centre project, led by Chandrakant Patel, HP Fellow and director of the Sustainable IT Ecosystem Lab, will examine how energy is used and managed for the entire lifetime of a data centre, from its design, synthesis, operation and end-of-life for its components. The research team, which includes computer scientists, materials scientists, physicists, and mechanical and electrical engineers, will use this information to develop data centre technologies that achieve a massive reduction in resource consumption while maintaining performance, reliability and uptime requirements.

HP expects this research to open up new markets for its business by extending the technology to other areas such as smart buildings, grids and print factories.

The second sustainability research initiative is focused on replacing the copper-based electrical connections used in today’s IT systems with optical laser communication links.

The Photonic Interconnect project, led by HP Senior Fellow and Director of Information and Quantum Systems Lab, R. Stanley Williams, builds on years of research dedicated to building photonic optical connections and components.

Photonic interconnections make it possible to fit dozens, and eventually hundreds, of processors on server system chips. In addition, the optical connections are 20 times more efficient than what is on the market today and will save companies multiple gigawatts of power annually, thus driving down IT costs. The photonic interconnects, which range in distance from 100 metres to 100 nanometres, also enable more flexible system configurations that can be quickly redeployed based on business needs.

HP Labs also introduced a new project, to be led by Patel, focused on developing a set of tools that can model, predict, measure and manage the environmental impact of product manufacturing, supply chains and business processes.

HP will develop software and services tools to measure and manage key environmental impact metrics, such as carbon emissions, total energy usage and non-recoverable energy consumption. As per the announcement, HP will use the tools to help customers re-engineer their businesses to be more sustainable and cost-effective through the innovative use of IT. This project will initially focus on three primary areas:

HP Labs researchers are developing analyses of commercial printing and publishing industries that compare the sustainability impact of their current business models against a reduced impact that would result from the deployment of new research technologies. The aim is to identify and quantify how such research technologies can be best deployed to increase efficiency and reduce resource and energy use as well as carbon emissions. HP plans to extend this research to its customers in other vertical industries.

HP Labs researchers have developed a unique approach to quantify the costs and environmental impact of a product by looking at the amount of available energy, known as exergy, that was used in that product’s life cycle from extraction, manufacturing, shipping, usage and recycling. HP Labs and the University of California at Berkeley have jointly developed the Lifetime Exergy Advisor, a software tool designed to assess a product’s total environmental impact through joules, units of available energy. According to the report, the Lifetime Exergy Advisor can help organizations determine the environmental benefits gained from using alternative materials and processes across every phase of the product life cycle. HP believes that as the world’s energy resources are increasingly tapped, companies will measure the amount of joules associated with the creation of a product much they way they measure dollars, so joules will be valued as much as currency.

To harness the knowledge of the world’s leading experts in sustainability, HP Labs researchers plan to create an open online resource, called a “sustainability hub,” to gather and share data and information about the sustainable design of products. Sustainability experts, researchers, scientists, engineers and academia from around the world are invited to contribute to the hub, which will have a repository of research information dedicated to the development of tools and methodologies for sustainability. The sustainability hub is expected to be available to the public in 2009. HP Labs intends to apply the data in future research to quantify the amount of available energy used when new products and supply chains are created across the entire global ecosystem.