Tools Towards the Sustainability and Circularity of Data Centers

Ocean warming events resilience capability in underwater computing platforms

Underwater data centers (UDCs) use the ocean's cold-water resources for free cooling and have low cooling costs. However, UDC cooling is affected by marine heat waves, and underwater seismic events thereby affecting UDC functioning continuity. Though feasible, the use of reservoirs for UDC cooling is non-scalable due to the high computing overhead, and inability to support continuity for long duration marine heat waves. The presented research proposes a mobile UDC (capable of migration) to address this challenge. The proposed UDC migrates from high underwater ground displacement ocean regions to regions having no or small underwater ground displacement. It supports multiple client underwater applications without requiring clients to develop, deploy, and launch own UDCs. The manner of resource utilization is influenced by the client's service level agreement. Hence, the proposed UDC provides resilient services to the clients and the requiring applications. Analysis shows that using the mobile UDC instead of the existing reservoir UDC approach enhances the operational duration and power usage effectiveness by 8.9-48.5% and 55.6-70.7% on average, respectively. In addition, the overhead is reduced by an average of 95.8-99.4%.

Comparing South Africa’s Sustainability and Circular Economic Roadmap to The Rest of the World

In 2015, the United Nations Member States developed a collective blueprint for sustainability and development. The 2030 Plan includes the 17 UN-SDGs, which are an immediate call for action from all countries in the form of a global collaboration. To date, a number of countries have made significant strides in achieving the goals. One solution is the transition from a linear economy to a circular economy. Together with this, new 4IR innovative technologies has helped many countries in their transition to a circular economy as well as achieving the SDGs. Countries and organizations have also adopted environmental, social, and governance reporting as another technique, and have become mandatory in some regions and organizations. The economy of South Africa is beset by poverty and inequality, considerable unemployment, carbon-intensive, water insecurity and slow GDP growth. Furthermore, the COVID-19 epidemic has caused the economic crisis to worsen further and emphasizes the need for a new development strategy to spur economic recovery. In this paper, we will compare South Africa’s sustainability and circular economic road map to the rest of the world, and we suggest solutions and policies that can be put in place for the future benefit of the country.