How green was my virtual valley? Linden Lab pairs with Terremark

by Tateru Nino May 19th 2009 at 1:00PM

Filed under: News items, Second Life, Virtual worlds

One of the tales you see circulating in the media every quarter is that the carbon footprint of a Second Life avatar is the same as that of a citizen of Brazil, based on energy consumption. The story goes around a few times each year, though technically it wasn't really all that accurate even when it began to circulate.

Around the time that the calculation was done, Linden Lab was already in the process of slashing power-consumption across its facilities, and presently uses only a third compared to similar servers. Plus, there's the little detail that the carbon footprint of the average Brazilian is quite small, a mere fraction of the world average.

Now the Lab is moving into newer, greener ~~pastures~~ err ... facilities, having closed a deal with Miami-based Terremark to start moving Second Life servers into Terremark's colocation facilities outside of Washington DC.

This makes the first Second Life data-center 'East of the Mississippi'. A data-center presence near the well-connected nation's capital could significantly boost Second Life performance for users in the Eastern half of the USA, as well as for users in the European Union.

Additionally, Linden Lab is taking advantage of the move to further reduce the per-capita power consumption of the Second Life grid, and the shift to Terremark's facilities should additionally reduce the ancillary power-consumption.

"We are serious about accounting for green technology in our future infrastructure decisions," Frank Ambrose (Linden Lab's SVP of Global Technology) told us yesterday, "It's a long process, but server power consumption was a good start. Lots more to consider in this space, but wanted to let people know its a key strategy (just like performance within Second Life). We won't sacrifice performance, but think we can be environmentally efficient at the same time."

Are you a part of the most widely-known collaborative virtual environment or keeping a close eye on it? Massively's Second Life coverage keeps you in the loop.

Tags: frank-ambrose, linden-lab, second-life, terremark, virtual-worlds, washington-dc

Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)

Prokofy said on 11:11PM 5-19-2009

There is absolutely no basis for saying that Brazilians use less carbon than avatars. It's not scientific whatsoever. It's one of those guilt-ridden Northern liberal thirdworldist fictions.

BTW, there's a lot of Brazilians in SL now. So, all those Brazilian avatars must be offsetting the good those non-avatarized Brazilians accomplish all those years. However, it's all the fault of old white guys in California, they are to blame for everything.

Jay said on 10:26PM 5-19-2009

Leaving the air-conditioning needs out of it right now and without knowing the exact number of servers needed to run SL with 4 regions per server it is still a huge amount of Electricity. However, that they are moving to a Data Centre powered by nuclear power certainly backs up the claim of lowering the carbon footprint on their side.

But, you still have a constant minimum 40,000 computers connecting to the grid(tm) each of those using 1,752,000kWh of electricty, which based on coal fired technology is a minimum of... 54,312,000 short tons of CO2 for the minimum 40,000 players of Second Life.

For more tangental calculations... Yes, I am now venturing into the ridiculous >.>)

54 million tons of CO2 for SL's 40,000 campers. 10 linden per hour by 40,000 people is 3.5 billion $Linden. In other words each $Linden has an environmental cost of 31 pounds (14kg) of CO2,

Buy US$20 of $Linden and you just helped to create 84,000kg of CO2

Suze said on 1:14AM 5-20-2009

Wow. Its a good thing noone said that then

Gwyneth Llewelyn said on 9:18PM 5-22-2009

Nice to see someone touting nuclear power as green energy :)

More seriously, I wonder if they're going to continue to use Terremark on other world-wide locations on both sides of the Atlantic as well as on both Americas. That would definitely make things very interesting. Specially because I don't see a lot of latency going down for non-US users just because of the push over to the East Coast — I oversee servers in San Francisco, Phoenix, and New York, and the difference between them is merely 15-30 ms, thanks to the ultra-speed digital backbone supporting the US. Pipe bits across the Atlantic, and you'll easily get another 140-150ms on it...