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Frugal Computing (2021)

wimvanderbauwhede.github.io

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Re: Frugal Computing (2021)

#91

Post by AtlasBarfed »

AtlasBarfed wrote: post #84

Here's an idea. A pie in the sky idea! What is SpaceX's starship good for? Well, what does space have? Solar power in gobs. A lot of the economic barriers for space based stuff is just moving stuff around and getting it back to earth. Well, for computation you don't have to do that. You just beam the answers back. Starlink has the networking substrate already. With the end of exponential churn in hardware, soon orbit…

Apparently the space telescopes have liquid helium cooling, and there are .1 Kelvin pools in space for astronomical detectors.

I guess you can use pools of onboard liquid as heat sinks if the radiative surface is insufficient at peak, and then radiate the rest from the heat sink pool when it is, say, behind the earth or not working as hard.

Re: Frugal Computing (2021)

#92

Post by kbelder »

phtrivier wrote: post #11

> To address these challenges, action is needed on many fronts. What will you do to make frugal computing a reality? Frustrating that the authors ends with such an "open note", without any practical "first steps". (This [1] at least _tries_ to give some options, as arguable as they are.) There are obvious contenders: * keep your phone longer. Brag about it. Find a persuasive way to _demand_ that apps, updates, etc...…

I don't know if I'm unusual, or not... but I've never voluntarily upgraded my phone. I've always lost it or broke it, and been forced to buy a new one. My longest surviving phone was maybe three years.

I could certainly believe that I'm just more violent and forgetful than most...

Re: Frugal Computing (2021)

#93

Post by littlestymaar »

zokier wrote: post #10

> As a society we need to start treating computational resources as finite and precious, to be utilised only when necessary, and as effectively as possible. Considering that on AWS potentially every millisecond of compute time and every database write is billed separately, I think the financial incentives are already there to consider computational resources precious. > Extending the life time is also the key action…

AWS has incentives to reduce their footprint to a minimum, but they have an even stronger incentive to increase their consumers' resource consumption (because at the end of the day, that's what they are billing!)

Re: Frugal Computing (2021)

#94

Post by littlestymaar »

Veedrac wrote: post #25

Abstinence-only climate education is such a depressing notion. There is plenty of clean energy. It is not running out. The idea that we should impoverish ourselves to protect against a problem we can solve without impoverishing ourselves is unjustifiably self-destructive.

> There is plenty of clean energy.

No energy is clean. Some sources are dirtier than others, but they all have an enormous footprint.

The only clean energy is the one you don't consume.

Also, there's no reason why frugality should lead to impoverishment, in fact what drives energy consumption the most isn't by far what benefit the user the most: tracking, ads, video as the default medium (because ads!), spam, planned hardware obsolescence, etc.

Re: Frugal Computing (2021)

#95

Post by phtrivier »

marcosdumay wrote: post #79
phtrivier wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I accept the accusation of pessimism. Even being very familiar with the same source as yours ! But looking at this: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/electricity-prod-source-s... I do not read it as "we replaced all of those on your left yesterday" ; but rather as "we have moslty kept those on your left, but some of the new ones we're building are a not as dirty, and anyway last year was weird." If you look at the w…

> "we have moslty kept those on your left, but some of the new ones we're building are a not as dirty, and anyway last year was weird." Where do you see that? Coal is falling about as quickly as the fastest rate it ever grew, natural gas is falling (I didn't expect that one 2 years ago). The only fossil fuel growing is oil, very slowly and from a low initial level. And the growth on renewables continues on an exponen…

You're right, I should have pointed out that the data about coal going up in 2021 after two years of going down was restricted to the US ; my bad.

We'll have to wait for data about the global trend in 2021- I suspect we'll have a rebound effect after the pandemic.

That still leaves plenty to replace "on your left"... Let's do that, shall we ?

Re: Frugal Computing (2021)

#96

Post by marcosdumay »

phtrivier wrote: post #95
marcosdumay wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "we have moslty kept those on your left, but some of the new ones we're building are a not as dirty, and anyway last year was weird." Where do you see that? Coal is falling about as quickly as the fastest rate it ever grew, natural gas is falling (I didn't expect that one 2 years ago). The only fossil fuel growing is oil, very slowly and from a low initial level. And the growth on renewables continues on an exponen…

You're right, I should have pointed out that the data about coal going up in 2021 after two years of going down was restricted to the US ; my bad. We'll have to wait for data about the global trend in 2021- I suspect we'll have a rebound effect after the pandemic. That still leaves plenty to replace "on your left"... Let's do that, shall we ?

From the analysis there, it looks like the US suffered an intense drought last year and replaced the lost hydropower with coal. That probably pushed the global total up, but it's not a given that it has increased overall.

But anyway, yes, let's keep replacing them. The faster the better.

Re: Frugal Computing (2021)

#97

Post by floatboth »

0thgen wrote: post #57
user-the-name wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, nobody mines bitcoin on GPUs. Surely you would know that if you're here trying to make argument about it?

I was under the impression that standard bitcoin mining leveraged GPUs for the heavy lifting. If that's not the case I'm happy to know what does

It's all the other shitcoins that are mined on GPUs.

Re: Frugal Computing (2021)

#98

Post by stupidworld »

wink wrote: post #23

> To address these challenges, action is needed on many fronts. What will you do to make frugal computing a reality? I dunno, isn't this the same thing as blaming climate change on the people who take a single vacation by plane per year, no matter what else they're doing the other 51 weeks to try to live a non-wasteful life? I like my home server and having my data here, on LAN speed. Of course that's probably not th…

If you havent noticed UN and west blamed people from developing countries who mostly use one light bulb. They do anything but reducing consumtion.

Re: Frugal Computing (2021)

#99

Post by MisterSandman »

WesolyKubeczek wrote: post #56

The incentives are still there for churning out more and more code, compile it on more and more CI/CD pipelines, run it on clusters of more and more powerful machines, and interface it to more and more powerful computers in our pockets which have gigabytes of RAM, terabytes of storage, mad gigahertz multi-core CPUs but somehow still amount to being slow dumb terminals. Damn, even open source world favors constant chu…

> "Where are all the gains?"

Are you serious? You're using opening a text document as the criteria here? So the fact that the MacBook Pro can run code and simulations that would've taken an unimaginable amount of energy and effort in the commodore days is moot to you?

Barring Bitcoin, pretty much every technology has made processing of information and data far, far more efficient. At the end of the day, it doesn't matter if the United Airlines app is 200 MB larger than it should be, if it's saving the company millions of dollars and saving everybody else energy.

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