Follow the moon

Companies that provide services to large corporations or groups of people often work 24/7 on the principle of “Follow the Sun” - when some time zones just wake up, others are already working or going to bed. This wave goes around the globe, following the rising of the Sun (its "front" is just at 8 - 10 am). This time is the time of peak load on electric networks.

For computers — and cloud computing in particular — a “Follow the Moon” scheme would be more appropriate when servers serving specific companies are working on the other side of the globe. At night, things are much better with cooling, and the load on electrical networks is not so great. With the spread of Cloud computing, managing the flow of computing will become much easier (for example, read about MapReduce technology ).

Thus, two waves would go around the Earth - the peak of energy use (on the day side) and the peak of computer calculations (on the night one) - in antiphase, rather than adding up, as it is happening now.

Of course, this is true mainly for those systems where the data transfer time is less than the computation time (or the ready data is transferred). An example is a Google network that processes pages or web servers. Where transmission time is critical, it is better to use a different approach.