111–120 of 163 posts
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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/
> Following this logic, I often thought electric heaters are a waste of energy since they perform no computation. That's true of resistive heating. Heat pumps are more efficient.
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For many a datacenter - balancing the loads across the three-phase power supply is one area that makes one of, if not the biggest difference in the bill/power charged for using. Though that for many a tech, is an area they are more inclined to overlook. Then quality of the power (clean sine or noise spikes) auditing, then the factor that UPS's do square wave. Though that's more stability and indeed longevity of your…
When you deploy a datacenter at this scale you contract for an amount of power and you're basically obligated to use it. The trick is to get more compute out of the same amount of power. By the way if you still have AC UPS systems that is probably your #1 problem and you definitely will not benefit from some fancy machine learning thing. Just get rid of most of your AC systems. For example you may benefit by adopting…
The cut-off for that level of work I'd say is if you design your own servers over just speccing from a vendor level is when you would be doing this. Upto that, it's still vendor off shelf. Though been a while and an option some vendors may now offer at lower scales these days.
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The cost to move atoms and bits everywhere in the world is near zero. This means that you could be the best in your field for hundreds of miles around, but your neighbors might still go on Amazon and order a product manufactured in China. I worry about this.
It works both ways. Find or invent a tiny niche and be among the best in the world in it, and the whole world (including China) will come to you for it.
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?
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…
Sure, tho youtube cat videos are not a basic need in my humble opinion, and neither is tracking my every digital move so you can sell me to advertisers.
>Factories, food, electricity can’t be decreased if every decrease per person is followed by an increase in headcounts
Well, food demand will increase, but can we and the comparatively fragile system that is our planet afford that people eat a big chunk of cow every day? How about a big chunk of cow every few days instead?
We can actually decrease factories or rather their ecological footprint, and we can use less electricity (a new fridge uses less electricity than an old fridge, and there is technological advancement to be had, and a lot of low hanging fruits still) and we can can produce energy with less pollution. And we can plant some fucking trees. And then even cut down those trees and bury them in the ground, putting back some of the carbon we took out before. And regulate polluters into oblivion.
A lot of changes would be "hard", like taking away people's daily burgers, and punishing corporate polluters. So they probably will not happen because politicians are chicken shits, scared they will be voted out of office if the price of meat goes up, or some coal mine closes and loses some jobs. But we can at least regulatory incentivize good behavior and better products.
But yeah, my plan would also include tackling the population issue as a major part of it. Not in a "one child" Chinese way, of course, but I'd strongly deincentivize having many children, starting with no more tax breaks/credits after birth two and creating harsh prison sentences for people who are not willing to pay their child support (which is different to not being able to pay, of course), but also investing heavily in making access to free contraceptives and education about contraceptives available to everybody. But sadly there are far too many evil morons running around preaching abstinence-only, because their imaginary friend in the Heavens doesn't like the feel of latex on the skin or something.
And a lot more out there, I'd also invade the Vatican and try the pope and his flunkies for crimes against humanity. If we can put Serbs and African "leaders" on trial, we should be able to do the same to the pope.
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That's amazing, but what sort of computation does it do while heating? Are you supposed to queue up your rendering until it's cold outside, or does it mine bitcoins?
I hope it does something more useful than mining bitcoins. There are many research projects that could use some more computing power and that would bring a gain to humanity.
I get the feeling if money was not involved it may qualify as a worthy research project.
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…
> I guess it's the closest Google is comfortable at being when serving Russian customers. Guess again (TLDR: Law requires Internet companies to store Russians’ personal data within country’s borders ) https://www.wsj.com/articles/google-moves-some-servers-to-ru...
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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…