编者按：惠普实验室的可持续生态系统研究组(SERg)通过与大学间的合作，扩充自己的研究实力，通过一个开放创新的独特研究模型，扩充了自己的研究实力，而后将研究成果传输给惠普旗下的业务集团，以进行产品及服务开发。

    可持续生态系统研究组(SERg)与顶尖大学合作以创建可持续IT生态系统
    Sustainable Ecosystems Research Group (SERg) collaborates with top universities to create sustainable IT ecosystems

    尽管惠普实验室的可持续生态系统研究组(SERg)并不是该领域最大的研究机构，但是得益于一个开放创新的独特研究模型，它对于IT生态系统的影响相当深远。通过与大学间的合作，该研究组扩充了自己的研究实力，而后将研究成果传输给惠普旗下的业务集团，以进行产品及服务开发。该模型的独特之处，在于惠普实验室与大学合作伙伴之间具有深度与广度的合作关系。
    The Sustainable Ecosystems Research Group (SERg) at HP Labs isn't the largest, but through a unique open-innovation research model, its impact on IT ecosystems has been profound. The group extends its research capabilities through university partnerships, and then transfers working solutions to HP business units (BUs) for product and service development. What makes the model unique is the length and degree of collaboration among HP Labs and participating universities.

    “我们并没有简单地资助一个博士生研究团队，然后等上一年时间，要求他们带着能发表的成果回来。我们采用的方式是，资助一个长期的合作，并且与合作大学的研究者们保持着紧密的关系。”获得惠普实验室“杰出科学家”称号的研究员Cullen Bash说，“我们的目标是开发可用的解决方案，然后传输给惠普旗下的业务集团，以解决现实世界中用户所面对的问题。”
    "Rather than simply funding a team of Ph.D. students for a year and asking that they come back with findings they can publish, we invest in long-term collaborations and work closely with our university researchers," said Cullen Bash, distinguished technologist at HP Labs. "Our goal is to develop working solutions that we can pass along to HP BUs to address real-world customer problems."

    开放创新的研究模型
    Open innovation research model

    SERg的开发创新研究模型会使得合作各方均获得收益。该模型能够使惠普实验室获得大量的研究能力与研究资源，同时也可以推动惠普业务部门对于产品及服务的创新。该模式还给予了博士生们一个研究解决现实可持续发展问题的机会，他们更有机会作为专职研究人员为惠普实验室工作。但是，最终的赢家是惠普的用户，他们是最终从这些创新产品及服务中获益的一方。
    SERg's open innovation research model is paying off for all participating parties. The model provides HP Labs access to expanded research expertise and resources, while fueling product and service innovation for HP business units. It gives Ph.D. students the opportunity to work on real sustainability problems, while positioning themselves for possible full-time research positions at HP Labs and elsewhere. But the ultimate winners are HP customers, who end up benefiting from new and innovative products and services.

    惠普实验室的SERg目前与十家顶尖大学的研究机构建立了合作关系，包括卡内基梅隆大学，加州大学伯克利分校，爱尔兰的Limerick大学以及弗吉尼亚理工大学。这些合作关系中最关键的一个层面是，它们为惠普的大量产品创造了价值：从企业级服务器、存储、网络再到消费级笔记本、PC以及移动设备。
    HP Labs' SERg is currently involved in ten university partnerships, including top research institutions like Carnegie Mellon, UC Berkeley, University of Limerick in Ireland and Virginia Tech. The most important aspect of these collaborations is that they create value for HP's range of products—from enterprise servers, storage and networking to consumer laptops, PCs and mobile devices.

    惠普实验室SERg团队的首席科学家Amip Shah，他在加入惠普实验室全职工作之前曾作为加州大学伯克利分校的一名博士生亲身参与了类似合作项目。他认为，这是一个非常有趣、能够解决现实问题的项目，对学生很有吸引力。
    According to Amip Shah, a principal scientist in HP Labs' SERg team, who himself participated in the program as a Ph.D. candidate at UC Berkeley before joining HP Labs as a full-time researcher, it's the interesting, real-world problems that draw students to the program.

    他说：“惠普了解业务层面以及用户层面所面临的竞争。许多学生都被这个项目所吸引，因为这给予了他们能够为研究做出贡献，并且帮助企业解决实际问题的机会。”
    "HP understands the challenges that businesses and customers face," he said. "Many students are drawn to the program because they're given opportunities to impact technology and help solve real problems facing organizations."

    对于数据中心效率的研究成就了可持续发展工具
    Research into data center efficiency results in sustainability tool

    SERg最为引人注目的成就之一，就是环境可持续发展评估工具(ESAT)。该工具源于加州大学伯克利分校一项关于数据中心资源无效利用的长期研究项目。研究者们专注于如何利用热力学第二定律，通过熵的产生点来监测能源消耗的无效之处。
    One of SERg's notable successes is the Environmental Sustainability Assessment Tool (ESAT). The tool originated from a multiyear project with UC Berkeley that focused on energy inefficiencies in the data center. Researchers focused specifically on how to use the second law of thermodynamics for detecting inefficiencies in energy consumption by pinpointing where entropy is generated.

    Shah说：“项目开始的时候，我们希望以一种前所未有的方式来研究数据中心。当时的目标是，找出数据中心哪里的能源消耗得到了合理利用而哪里没有。项目进行了几年后，我们意识到，同样的研究方法可以扩展到如何更好地构建数据中心上。经过近10年的研究，成果就是ESAT。”
    "When the project began we wanted to analyze data centers in a way that hadn't been done before," said Bash. "The goal was to find out where data centers are efficient and where they're not. A few years into the project, we realized that the same methodology could be extended to analyze how data centers are built as well. The result, almost a decade after we started, was ESAT."

    Shah表示，惠普很快就意识到，ESAT可以用于数据中心。“我们认为，ESAT不仅可以用于数据中心，还可以在许多不同行业中有用武之地。”
    According to Shah, HP soon realized that ESAT could be used beyond the data center. "We recognized that ESAT could be used for many applications across different industries, not just data centers."

    例如，惠普使用ESAT帮助一家大型玻璃制造厂降低成本，并且提高玻璃生产流程的可持续发展。无论是数据中心还是玻璃生产，惠普现在能够使用ESAT以帮助用户了解，他们的产品整个生命周期对于环境带来的影响，从生产环节中的稀土精炼到碳排放，再到生命周期结束后的废弃及再利用。
    For example, HP is using ESAT to help a large glass manufacturer reduce the cost and improve the sustainability of its glass manufacturing process. Whether a data center or a glass panel, HP can now use ESAT to help customers understand the environmental impact of products over their entire lifecycle, from rare earth mineral extraction and carbon footprint during manufacturing, to their disposal and recycling.

    为非专业人员提供的自动化ESAT
    Automating ESAT for the non expert

    在ESAT的开发完成后，下一个环节就是要对这一工具进行修改，使之更有效率且易于使用，后一点对于非专业人员非常重要。Shah解释说：“环境分析的过程非常繁琐，通常还需要专业人员的介入。比如说，当分析一个塑料水瓶的时候，你需要观察大概900种不同的材料以及能源走向。这意味着900个单独的分析，你不可能以手动的方式来支持这样的分析。”
    After developing ESAT, the next step was to modify the tool so it was more efficient and easier to use, especially by non-experts. "Environmental analysis can be laborious to implement and often requires a trained expert," Shah explains. "When analyzing a plastic water bottle, for instance, you're looking at maybe 900 different materials and energy flows. That's 900 separate analyses. You can't scale a manual process to support that kind of workload."

    通过与弗吉尼亚理工发现分析中心的合作，惠普实验室解决了这个问题。它们开发了一个工具来自动化诸如ESAT这类工具使用中所涉及的大工作量部分。这个工具的名称叫做自动生命周期分析工具(Auto LCA)。使用Auto LCA，无需手动对应每一种材料所带来的环境影响，你只需简单地上载一个清单（类似材料清单）。这一工具将自动分析清单上的每一种材料，并且计算诸如碳排放、环境污染、人类健康等等方面的影响。在后续工作中，这一分析还将跟随一个环境友好材料的清单以替换原有清单中的“热点”（那些材料清单中所包含的对于环境有着重大影响的材料或流程部分）。
    HP Labs is solving this problem through a collaboration with Virginia Tech's Discovery Analytics Center to develop a tool to automate the most labor-intensive portions of using a tool like ESAT. The result is the Auto Lifecycle Analysis tool (Auto LCA). With Auto LCA, rather than manually mapping the environmental impact for each material, you can simply upload a list (like a commonly found Bill of Materials). The tool will then automatically analyze each material on the list and calculate impacts like carbon emissions, environmental toxicity, and human health. In ongoing work, such an analysis is followed by automatic recommendation of environmentally friendly substitutes for any "hotspots" (environmental hotspots are those components or processes causing the highest impacts in the Bill of Materials).

    （Auto LCA工具工作的原理示意图。用户输入产品描述，Auto LCA引擎开始自动运行一些不同的高级数据分析算法，用户得到一个包含各种材料碳足迹的示意图。这个例子中使用的是一个饼状图。）
    A schematic that shows how the Auto-LCA tool works conceptually. A user inputs a product description, the Auto-LCA engine automatically goes through a few different advanced data analytics algorithms, and the user gets back a breakdown of the carbon footprint of the various components. The example shown is that of a printed circuit board.

    解决数据中心能源消耗谜题
    Solving the data center energy consumption conundrum

    另一个困扰许多企业的数据中心能源问题，是如何平衡计算机系统以及设施的能源消耗与成本。针对如何创建能源有效利用的数据中心，SERg通过爱尔兰研究科学工程与科技学院(IRCSET)与爱尔兰的Limerick大学进行了合作。目标是开发一个能够全面分析能源消耗与成本的工具，将整个数据中心生态系统纳入考虑。
    Another data center energy issue that has plagued many organizations is the balance of computer system and facility energy consumption and cost. In its mission to create more energy-efficient data centers, SERg partnered with the University of Limerick in Ireland through an Irish Research Council for Science, Engineering and Technology (IRCSET) grant. The goal of the partnership was to develop a tool to analyze energy consumption and cost holistically, taking the entire data center ecosystem into account.

    通常而言，设计数据中心时，设计者一般不会考虑计算机系统各组件之间错综复杂的相互作用。另一方面，计算机系统的设计者也不会考虑容纳这些设备的设施所面临的能源成本问题。Bash的意见是，正因为这两者之间没有相互交集，从而导致了整个数据中心能源成本的上升。
    Typically, the people who design data centers don't think about the interactions among the intricate components of computer systems. While on the other hand, designers of computer systems don't necessarily think about the energy costs of the facilities in which the systems will reside. According to Bash, these two worlds have collided, causing overall data center energy consumption to rise.

    “在设施这一层面，让数据中心运行在一个温度比较高的环境可以节省成本。但是数据中心温度越高，服务器就越难冷却自身，从而导致消耗更多资源来散热。我们缺乏一个工具来综合分析这些问题，从而开发出一个更具持续性的整体能源消耗模型。”
    "At the facility level, it's more cost effective to run data centers at higher temperatures. But the warmer your data center gets, the harder your servers must work to cool themselves, leading them to consume more energy. We lacked a tool to analyze these issues together and figure out a more sustainable overall energy consumption model."

    多层次能源建模工具帮助惠普用户预测能源成本
    Multi-Scale Energy Modeling tool helps HP customers predict energy costs

    为了解决这个难题，惠普和Limerick大学创建了多层次能源建模(MSEM)工具。根据Bash的介绍，这一工具能够进行全面能源消耗分析，“从芯片层次一直到冷却塔”。
    To solve this conundrum, HP and the University of Limerick built the Multi-Scale Energy Modeling (MSEM) tool, which, according to Bash, analyzes energy consumption comprehensively, "from the chip to the cooling tower."

    （ESSN工具截图。用户在左边输入EcoPOD场所以及一些运行参数，右边的图表列出该工具的计算结果，包括数据中心有效性(PUE)，碳排放，性能等等。用户可以比较不同地点的不同POD(右上的图表)。）
    Screenshot of the ESSN tool. The user inputs the EcoPOD location and some operating parameters on the left; the plots on the right show the outputs from the tool in terms of data center efficiency (PUE), carbon footprint, capacity, etc. The user can also compare the energy use of different PODs in different locations (table on the top-right).

    今天，惠普的企业级服务器、存储及网络(ESSN)业务正在计划使用MSEM以帮助决定惠普最近发布的性能优化数据中心POD 240a(称作EcoPOD)的预计能源消耗与成本。
    Today, HP's Enterprise Servers, Storage and Networking (ESSN) businesses is planning to use MSEM to help determine projected energy consumption and costs for HP's recently announced Performance Optimized Data Center, POD 240a, dubbed the "EcoPOD."

    例如，因为数据中心的能源消耗与成本是依所在地点的季节变化而定的，企业需要能够为新数据中心的可能地点各自建模。使用MSEM工具，HP ESSN咨询师可以输入不同的城市、IT压力以及能源消耗。该工具能够为每一地点提供预计能源消耗、温室气体排放以及运营成本。得益于MSEM工具，HP能够更准确地预测EcoPOD将消耗多少能源，以帮助用户选择成本最适宜的地点。
    For example, because a data center's energy consumption and costs will vary according to the climate in which it is located, organizations need the ability to model different geographic locations for new data centers. Using the MSEM tool, HP ESSN consultants can plug in different cities, IT loads, and energy costs. The tool will provide projected energy consumption, greenhouse gas emissions, and operating costs for each location. Thanks to the MSEM tool, HP can more accurately predict how much energy the EcoPOD will use, allowing customers to choose the most cost-effective locations.

    开放创新在圣何塞州立大学达到完整循环
    Open innovation comes full circle at San Jose State University

    最终，在合作大学、惠普实验室以及惠普业务部门之间形成的知识有效循环使得SERg的研究模型更为有效。Bash举例，圣何塞州立大学使用惠普提供的ESAT中的数据模型，做为材料工程学课程的一部分。该大学开始了开发他们自己的产品生命周期软件的研究。
    Ultimately, it's the flow of knowledge among participating universities, HP Labs and HP business units that makes SERg's research model so effective. According to Bash, this is exemplified by San Jose State University's use of data models from ESAT provided by HP, as part of an introductory materials engineering course. The university has since gone on to create their own product life cycle software.

    Bash说：“形象地说，ESAT现在达到了一个完整的循环。这一循环从与加州大学伯克利分校的合作研究开始，逐步成熟并且为HP ESSN提供了创新产品，现在又回到大学中成为了课程的一部分。”
    "ESAT has now travelled full circle, metaphorically speaking," said Bash. "What started as a research collaboration with UC Berkeley, matured into an innovative offering within HP ESSN, and is now influencing the curriculum at a major university."