An elegant new algorithm can significantly reduce the resource consumption of the world’s computer servers. Computer servers are as taxing on the climate as global air traffic combined, thereby making the green transition in IT an urgent matter. The researchers expect major IT companies to deploy the algorithm immediately.

Compared to existing load balancing methods, the new methodology can distribute efficiently clients among servers, ensuring that the load is balanced and the retrieval time is minimal. Mathematically, the improvement is equal to going from 100 steps to only 10. This method has already been applied by Vimeo, which stated that it has reduced the bandwidth usage by a factor of 8.

Source (University of Copenhagen – Faculty of Science. “Making computer servers worldwide more climate friendly.” ScienceDaily. ScienceDaily, 6 July 2021.)

Original paper: Aamand, A., Knudsen, J.B.T. and Thorup, M., 2021, June. Load balancing with dynamic set of balls and bins. In Proceedings of the 53rd Annual ACM SIGACT Symposium on Theory of Computing (pp. 1262-1275).