Funnelback
Search clouds on the horizon: Can they stop inefficient retrieval systems warming the planet?
Search facilities for organisations need hardware redundancy to avoid downtime and spare capacity to cope with peaks in query load. The end result can be multiple servers each emitting more than a tonne of CO2 per year(*) while sitting idle up to 90% of the time!
Many environmentally responsible and cost conscious organisations attempt to address this problem through virtualisation, but encounter serious response time issues when physical hardware is over-allocated or when different VMs compete for a single I/O subsystem.
My talk will analyse the potential of "search clouds" to provide the necessary peak capacity and redundancy while substantially reducing emissions (and cost). It will also attempt to quantify the CO2 costs of inefficiencies in component algorithms inherent in an enterprise search facility, using typical parameters for representative organisation types.
Speaker bio:
David Hawking has been a researcher in the field of Information Retrieval for almost 20 years and was awarded an honorary doctorate in Switzerland for his contributions to the objective evaluation of the quality of web search. He is still obsessed with finding ways to improve the quality of search, particularly within organisations. His research publications are listed at david-hawking.net/publications.shtml. He is currently Chief Scientist at Funnelback Ltd. He is also an Adjunct Professor at the Australian National University in Canberra where he currently supervises three PhD students.
