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Google is investing $3.3B to build clean data centers in Europe

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Re: Google is investing $3.3B to build clean data centers in Europe

#91

Post by alexis_fr »

rndgermandude wrote: post #69

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".

As long as there are always more humans on this planet, we will have to serve them. Factories, food, electricity can’t be decreased if every decrease per person is followed by an increase in headcounts, which is what’s happening of all western countries since we invented ecology.

In other words, do you have a plan for decreasing actual footprint without having it followed by: “Hey guys, we can afford increasing our population!”

Re: Google is investing $3.3B to build clean data centers in Europe

#92

Post by curious_fella1 »

skrebbel wrote: post #56
octosphere wrote: post #9

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?

I'm a startup founder, and I've never understood this worry. I know of scary few products by Google (or one of the other tech bigcos) that successfully wiped out an up-and-coming startup. They did acquire quite a bunch, but can you name a successful Google product that killed a startup without acquiring it? I'm sure there are some but it can't be much. Docs, Android, Firebase, Maps all came out of acquisitions. I mea…

Was gmail made in house?

Re: Google is investing $3.3B to build clean data centers in Europe

#93

Post by mehrdadn »

bigbaguette wrote: post #67
davedx wrote: post #64

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/

Confused, could you explain? A heater that puts its energy into something other than heating is just being inefficient at heating, right? Shouldn't you want it to put 100% of its energy into heating?

Re: Google is investing $3.3B to build clean data centers in Europe

#94

Post by greiskul »

mehrdadn wrote: post #93
bigbaguette wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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/

Confused, could you explain? A heater that puts its energy into something other than heating is just being inefficient at heating, right? Shouldn't you want it to put 100% of its energy into heating?

Well, not really, let's say we want to heat a room to 25 degrees Celsius. If we are converting 100% of the electricity used to heat, it will take X energy. If we use the energy for computing instead, and use the waste heat to heat the room, it will take maybe a little more energy. But the thing is, the computing is valuable, and with the money we can gain by "renting" the computing, we can buy more electricity, so we come out on top.

Now, like someone else commented, if you really want to heat an environment, the traditional resistance heating is not the best solution. With a heat pump, you can cheat, and get an efficiency of over 100% (because instead of using the energy to heat the room, you are using the energy to take heat from somewhere else and also put it in the room).

Re: Google is investing $3.3B to build clean data centers in Europe

#95

Post by mehrdadn »

greiskul wrote: post #94
mehrdadn wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Confused, could you explain? A heater that puts its energy into something other than heating is just being inefficient at heating, right? Shouldn't you want it to put 100% of its energy into heating?

Well, not really, let's say we want to heat a room to 25 degrees Celsius. If we are converting 100% of the electricity used to heat, it will take X energy. If we use the energy for computing instead, and use the waste heat to heat the room, it will take maybe a little more energy. But the thing is, the computing is valuable, and with the money we can gain by "renting" the computing, we can buy more electricity, so we…

Are you trying to be energy-efficient or are you trying to be cost-efficient? I thought the former but it seems you mean the latter.

Re: Google is investing $3.3B to build clean data centers in Europe

#96

Post by eitally »

badrequest wrote: post #41

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…

The models in isolation aren't useful. The knowledge to create models like them is where the value lies, but it's only possible to generate value if you can do this in a way that is broadly applicable... which is where building systems management partnerships come into play.

Yes, you can argue the point you made, but it's not particularly insightful because the specific IP employed to govern power mgmt at Google DCs is only truly applicable to Google DCs.

Re: Google is investing $3.3B to build clean data centers in Europe

#97

Post by cameronbrown »

skrebbel wrote: post #56
octosphere wrote: post #9

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?

I'm a startup founder, and I've never understood this worry. I know of scary few products by Google (or one of the other tech bigcos) that successfully wiped out an up-and-coming startup. They did acquire quite a bunch, but can you name a successful Google product that killed a startup without acquiring it? I'm sure there are some but it can't be much. Docs, Android, Firebase, Maps all came out of acquisitions. I mea…

Without Google's resources Android, Maps, YouTube, DoubleClick and the like wouldn't be the powerhouses they are today. Take that how you will, good or bad.

Re: Google is investing $3.3B to build clean data centers in Europe

#98

Post by smueller1234 »

dxbydt wrote: post #66
badrequest wrote: post #41

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…

You're exactly right. Hadoop and it's ecosystem are... a very poor replica of the system whose predecessor the respective Google papers were written about. There's glaring efficiency things like not supporting complex encodings (last I used HDFS, at least, it could only do full replication) or the query engines on top not implementing sampling in their aggregates as a default/out of the box, which the Google tools do.

Re: Google is investing $3.3B to build clean data centers in Europe

#99

Post by rndgermandude »

jonas21 wrote: post #77
rndgermandude wrote: post #69

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".

Google's datacenters are already carbon neutral. This is about going one step further and using locally-generated renewable energy to power the datacenters.

No they are not. They use energy, a lot of it. They want to run their data centers off of renewable, "carbon-free" energy sources and made some great strides towards that. But they aren't there yet.

On top of that, renewables aren't carbon neutral per se, either. And the hardware you put into those things isn't free either.

Now you might argue the services google is able to provide with them warrant the environmental costs, but that's another question entirely. And you might argue that google did a lot of things to reduce their footprint (and they did) but it's hardly close to zero, let alone negative.

Re: Google is investing $3.3B to build clean data centers in Europe

#100

Post by antoinealb »

curious_fella1 wrote: post #92
skrebbel wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm a startup founder, and I've never understood this worry. I know of scary few products by Google (or one of the other tech bigcos) that successfully wiped out an up-and-coming startup. They did acquire quite a bunch, but can you name a successful Google product that killed a startup without acquiring it? I'm sure there are some but it can't be much. Docs, Android, Firebase, Maps all came out of acquisitions. I mea…

Was gmail made in house?

Yes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Gmail
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