My colleague Narayan Rangarajan, Altair Engineering team leader, has contributed the following post:

If someone came to me today and said that a solar powered server farm is sustained green computing, I would say it’s only half of the equation. Here’s some trivia about solar energy:

1. Solar panels typically convert sunlight into electricity with an efficiency of only 10 to 20 percent.
2. The carbon footprint in manufacturing solar cells is high.
3. Creating solar cells is a high-energy process – it’s not easy to melt silica.

So this brings us to the question, what is sustainable? In my opinion, the top three would be reuse, eliminating waste and innovation. Let’s look at what each one means.

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My colleague Narayan Rangarajan, Altair Engineering team leader, has contributed the following guest post:

I recently read an interesting article that stated “two Google searches on a desktop computer produce 14g of CO₂, which is roughly the equivalent of boiling an electric kettle.”  While Google claims a much smaller CO₂ cost, the math is inescapable. With over 2 million searches a day, it is “the server farms, not the animal farms, that will be increasingly responsible for global warming!” Read More

Recently Boeing announced that the 787 had officially been certified by the FAA and EASA.  This is truly a great milestone for Boeing but also a great development for the aerospace industry.  The 787 is the first commercial airplane that is manufactured with more than 50 percent advanced-composite materials.  As someone that got involved with advanced-composite materials back in 1984, when I was a sophomore at MIT, I have hoped for this day for a long time.  Read More

It has been a while since my last blog entry.  It has been a busy time. I attended a great Altair India HTC, presenting at NDIA GVSETS and then experiencing the excitement around Altair HQ with the official launch of the LCO-140H (the world’s first series hydraulic hybrid transit bus). After those experiences, it is difficult for me to imagine why so many graduates are not enthused by automotive, or mechanical engineering in general, as I mentioned in a previous blog.

So I thought I’d talk about a couple things that I think are exciting ways to reverse this trend. Read More