Building a Greener Cloud and Computing’s Future on Arm
Our increasingly connected world is seeing an insatiable demand for computing power, driven by increasing volumes of data along with the integration of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) into our daily lives. All this has also led to greater demand to access data or services from any device at any time or place, which has been enabled by cloud computing.
However, as cloud computing takes on a greater role in our everyday lives, cloud providers continue to expand the environmental footprint of the facilities that house their clouds. These data centers currently consume 2% of the world’s electricity and, not surprisingly, experts predict this number could rise to 10% or even 15%¹ if significant architectural, hardware and software improvements are not implemented.
As we become more dependent on the cloud for our daily data-driven activities, shifting toward a greener, more sustainable version of cloud computing and reversing this negative environmental trend should be a global concern. As it requires a re-architecting of the world’s computing infrastructure, this transformation can only happen on Arm, the UK-based chip technology company that is redefining the future of computing.
Demands for change
The predicted increase in cloud power consumption and its environmental impact is not an acceptable outcome for innovative cloud decision makers, who aspire to achieve more efficient processing and reduced power consumption and deploy greener technologies that meet modern computing and sustainability demands.
This effort won’t just help save the planet and meet sustainability goals, but also will benefit companies’ bottom lines, lowering energy costs and offering significant opportunities to scale and innovate to achieve a competitive advantage.
Transforming computing infrastructure
Shifting from business as usual requires shifting away from legacy computing infrastructures, and this shift is underway as Arm and its partner ecosystem architect a new, greener cloud. Together, they are redefining what’s possible in cloud computing—from innovative processor designs to new concepts for data storage—so clouds running on Arm can perform more work, consume less energy and enable sustainable growth.
One great example of this is Cibo Labs and its new approach to monitoring Australia’s grazing lands to enable more profitable farms and sustainable landscapes. Its cloud service helps farmers improve the long-term health of their grazing pastures and can reduce their costs by 50%. By running its technology—which includes remote sensors and ML—in the cloud on Amazon Web Services (AWS) servers powered by Arm-based Graviton processors, Cibo Labs has increased efficiency and performance while consuming less power.
New ways to measure cloud success
Cloud providers seeking to transform their infrastructure are also rethinking how they measure success. These new metrics are driven by the guiding principle of heightened efficiency that delivers economic growth within a sustainable framework. Metrics based on this principle include performance per watt, revenue generated per square foot of data center space and transactions per watt and per kilogram of CO2.
The world’s biggest public cloud providers have taken notice of the value Arm technology offers both their businesses and the environment. In addition to AWS, cloud providers Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, Baidu, Tencent and Alibaba have adopted Arm Neoverse technology. They are already benefiting, experiencing price performance gains of 40 percent and more.²
Two of these companies, AWS and Alibaba, are designing their own Arm-based processors that will enable them to differentiate from legacy platforms. AWS continues to deliver superior price performance with its Graviton processor family, while Alibaba estimates its Yitian 710 processor will outperform current legacy server processors by 20%, with 50% improved energy efficiency.³
With benefits like these, both cloud providers and cloud users need to start asking: “Why isn’t my cloud infrastructure built on Arm?”
Changing the computing landscape
Demands for more efficient processing are becoming more pervasive across the entire computing landscape. As 5G network deployments increase, telecommunications operators such as Vodafone4, Dish and NTT DOCOMO5 are delivering faster speeds, higher bandwidth and lower latencies on Arm-based technologies—all with lower operating costs and energy consumption.
Digital transformation is also alive and well, with today’s supercomputers used for complex analysis and modeling tasks. RIKEN, Japan’s premier scientific research institute, built what was until recently the world’s most powerful supercomputer6 (and one of the most power-efficient), which runs on an Arm-based processor from Fujitsu. For a newly commissioned state-of-the-art supercomputer in the Republic of Korea, its K-AB21 processor, with an Arm chip of its own, aims to increase performance by 2.5 times while reducing power by 60%7. And NVIDIA’s Arm-based Grace CPU superchip is targeting high-performance computing, cloud graphics and gaming.
Save businesses and save the planet
Can computing alone get us to a net-zero-carbon world? Not on its own, but it will have a significant impact. The World Economic Forum estimates8 that digital technologies could reduce worldwide carbon emissions by 15% by 2030. Re-defining computing infrastructure will play an enormous role in achieving these targets.
Arm stands out today as the only solution that will enable environmental change for good across the entire computing infrastructure, while empowering companies to differentiate like never before. A greener cloud is something that the global population, increasingly reliant on the cloud, should demand. The time is now for companies to seize the opportunity to build a greener cloud and computing infrastructure on Arm.
This article was written and supplied by Arm.
1. www.iea.org/reports/data-centres-and-data-transmission-networks
2. https://www.arm.com/products/silicon-ip-cpu/neoverse/neoverse-n1
3. https://www.alizila.com/alibaba-unveils-server-chip-boost-data-centers-performance-efficiency/
4. https://www.lightreading.com//open-ran//vodafone-demands-arm-silicon-not-intel-for-open-ran-in-cities//d//d-id//773016
5. https://www.docomo.ne.jp/english/info/media_center/pr/2022/0301_00.html
6. https://www.arm.com//blogs//blueprint//fugaku-supercomputer
7. https://armkeil.blob.core.windows.net/developer/Files/pdf/solution-overview-arm-neoverse-v1-platform.pdf
8. https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2019/01/why-digitalization-is-the-key-to-exponential-climate-action/
