71–80 of 163 posts
Anyone find anything that Google does these days to be aggressively competitive? As a one-man startup guy, I feel everything I do pales in comparison to what Google are doing and I feel nothing more than /eclipsed/ by them. I have found myself wondering: "If you can't beat them join them" on many occasions. I probably should just merge into Google one day and stop my worrying?
At Google Next in April, I attended a talk by the C-level in charge of Google's Datacenters, and they bragged about using machine learning to manage/anticipate their power draw, and the subsequent efficiencies those brought. They also bragged about how much they're trying to make these centers powered by renewables. When an audience member asked if they would be releasing their models that help them manage power, the…
I did a bunch of work on managing/anticipating the power draw. ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13747481 ). Something nobody talks about is how grossly wasteful & inefficient Hadoop is. There's a bunch of cited papers ( https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.58... ) that study power consumption of Hadoop nodes, but nothing on how to actually reduce the consumption. So here's something you can…
The Hamina data center is close to Russia without being in Russia. I guess it's the closest Google is comfortable at being when serving Russian customers. In the north data centers can double as heating power plants when coupled with district heating. It's unfortunate that Google puts the excess heat into the sea. Yandex has a big data center in Mäntsälä. Their cooling water is used for heating the area. There are al…
It is amusing how in their goal to be carbon neutral they're just heating the sea directly, cutting out the atmosphere as a middle-man. I'm not sure what the numbers on it are though. I guess heating the sea will only be once but having CO in the atmosphere will provide recurring heating.
Bravo to Google for this show of corporate leadership. Their pledge to purchase renewable energy to match their real-time demand really is impressive, especially the note that it must create new renewable generation (discussed on the Google blog announcement not this article) . It is also prudent, as these long-term power purchase agreements (PPAs) with new renewable generators will be very competitive, probably much…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Hah that's amazing. I remember when I did bitcoin mining (only 1 GPU) and thinking it was getting noticeably warmer upstairs in our house, and how actually the bigger miners could use the heat to heat buildings. Great to hear this is being put into action. Computing -> heat.
Following this logic, I often thought electric heaters are a waste of energy since they perform no computation. But a French company is having a go at this: https://www.qarnot.com/computing-heater_qh-1/
Will these data centers still be subject to mass data collection by the us government (under arrangements similar to the prism program described in the Snowden relevations)? Does it matter at all that these centers are placed outside the us?
They might be (a lot) less bad than other data centers, but unless these google data centers have a neutral carbon footprint, they are not clean, and unless they have a negative footprint they are not "environmentally friendly".
Bravo to Google for this show of corporate leadership. Their pledge to purchase renewable energy to match their real-time demand really is impressive, especially the note that it must create new renewable generation (discussed on the Google blog announcement not this article) . It is also prudent, as these long-term power purchase agreements (PPAs) with new renewable generators will be very competitive, probably much…
I wonder, would it be feasible for them to use wind power to run time insensitive batch jobs in the daytime - crank down the processing power on these jobs when there's less green energy around?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Hah that's amazing. I remember when I did bitcoin mining (only 1 GPU) and thinking it was getting noticeably warmer upstairs in our house, and how actually the bigger miners could use the heat to heat buildings. Great to hear this is being put into action. Computing -> heat.
Following this logic, I often thought electric heaters are a waste of energy since they perform no computation. But a French company is having a go at this: https://www.qarnot.com/computing-heater_qh-1/
That's true of resistive heating. Heat pumps are more efficient.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Hah that's amazing. I remember when I did bitcoin mining (only 1 GPU) and thinking it was getting noticeably warmer upstairs in our house, and how actually the bigger miners could use the heat to heat buildings. Great to hear this is being put into action. Computing -> heat.
Following this logic, I often thought electric heaters are a waste of energy since they perform no computation. But a French company is having a go at this: https://www.qarnot.com/computing-heater_qh-1/