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Partha Ranganathan, a fellow at Hewlett-Packard Labs in Palo Alto, Calif., likens FAWN to an energy-efficiency project you might undertake in your home. “I can go room to room and turn down all the lights I’m not using, or I can replace all the lights with compact fluorescents or LEDs,” he says. “FAWN takes the second approach. It is moving away from the beaten path and starting to think about: How do I do something fundamentally more energy efficient with technology?”

At Hewlett-Packard, according to Ranganathan, engineers have developed a new class of energy-efficient servers called Project Moonshot, which draws upon many of the advances introduced by FAWN. “The industry is warming up to these ideas,” he says.

Andersen considered trying to bring his concept to market himself but wasn’t willing to move forward without the full involvement of his students. “I told them it had to be something they wanted to do,” he says. “And they all wanted to finish their PhDs instead, so I said, let’s finish some PhDs.”

But as Ranganathan noted, FAWN is not going away. Two startups, SeaMicro and Calxeda, have started manufacturing the hardware needed for companies to adapt FAWN for their needs, and Andersen was asked to evaluate SeaMicro’s technologies. As a further sign of corporate interest, Google, Network Appliance, and Intel have funded Andersen’s ongoing research. Companies don’t expect this low-power architecture to be a panacea. It could take a lot of programming to tailor these systems for their software, which in some cases might be cost-prohibitive. It also doesn’t work well for computation-intensive applications like video gaming and analysis of large data sets. Still, the power-consumption problem is one the computing industry cannot afford to ignore, according to Google distinguished engineer Luiz André Barroso.

“The objectives of FAWN in building high-performance, energy-efficient systems are also our objectives at Google,” says Barroso, who studies warehouse-scale computing. “If we want to continue investing in making our products better, we can’t give all the money to the electric company.”

Steven Swanson, a computer architecture expert at the  University of California, San Diego, agrees: “Cloud computing is all a kind of plumbing. If you get a better water-supply system, everyone benefits. Just like it’s not always clear where those benefits come from, you aren’t going to say, ‘Oh, those wimpy nodes really made my day.’ But it’s part of a whole bunch of ideas that are really enhancing our lives.”

At Carnegie Mellon, Andersen continues to improve his wimpy systems. He predicts that within the next couple of years, wimpy nodes will be used widely throughout the industry, fundamentally changing the way the major Internet companies build many of their computer networks. And while the revolution he ignited is taking place, Andersen plans to keep buying new toys to fill his drawer—though maybe he’ll get a second opinion when it comes time to name his next big idea.

Jennifer Bails is an award-winning freelance writer. She is a regular contributor to this magazine.

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