Home servers are greener than cloud • Hacker News Board

Re: Home servers are greener than cloud

#11

Post by sp332 » Wed, Nov 20, 2019, 11:17 PM UTC

oakwhiz wrote: post #8

I think I disagree somewhat with the premise of this article. Computers are more efficient in general when they are fully loaded. A home server is rarely fully utilized and doesn't realize the full potential of multitasking/virtualization. It is more efficient to share different tasks among the same set of disks and memory. On the cloud, anything you didn't use could theoretically be given to someone else. The hardwa…

I think the hardware lifecycle heavily favors the home server. This is reflected in the much higher cost of cloud computing vs owning the hardware. Cloud components have to be standardized and are swapped out en masse every few years.

Re: Home servers are greener than cloud

#12

Post by leifmetcalf » Wed, Nov 20, 2019, 11:32 PM UTC

tryptophan wrote: post #7

Fun fact, but CPUs/GPUs/etc are almost 100% efficient at converting electricity to heat, as they don't give off light energy like a heater would, via its glowing coils. So, theoretically, heating your house with CPUs would be greener than using central heating... If you live in a cold area, a home server's heat wouldn't be wasted, in fact it would theoretically lower your heating bill(by .01% or less, but hey!) as le…

Heat pumps are more than 100% efficient

Re: Home servers are greener than cloud

#13

Post by bloody-crow » Wed, Nov 20, 2019, 11:48 PM UTC

> I didn't have any quantitative estimates then, and still don't now. However, it's likely that a world in which there is one server per household or per street would be more electrically efficient than the current world of billionaire cloud servers.

This is the core of the article and it's basically guesswork. From all I read, I tend to believe the opposite actually. Cloud is a lot greener than home servers.

Re: Home servers are greener than cloud

#14

Post by Yetanfou » Thu, Nov 21, 2019, 12:14 AM UTC

sp332 wrote: post #11

oakwhiz wrote: post #8

I think I disagree somewhat with the premise of this article. Computers are more efficient in general when they are fully loaded. A home server is rarely fully utilized and doesn't realize the full potential of multitasking/virtualization. It is more efficient to share different tasks among the same set of disks and memory. On the cloud, anything you didn't use could theoretically be given to someone else. The hardwa…

I think the hardware lifecycle heavily favors the home server. This is reflected in the much higher cost of cloud computing vs owning the hardware. Cloud components have to be standardized and are swapped out en masse every few years.

The price of cloud computing is higher than that of owning and running the hardware. As to whether that implies the cost of running a commercial cloud is higher than that of running individual servers on customer premises is doubtful. I assume that the likes of Amazon, Microsoft, IBM and Oracle do not run commercial cloud operations at a loss.

Re: Home servers are greener than cloud

#15

Post by antisthenes » Thu, Nov 21, 2019, 12:36 AM UTC

bloody-crow wrote: post #13

> I didn't have any quantitative estimates then, and still don't now. However, it's likely that a world in which there is one server per household or per street would be more electrically efficient than the current world of billionaire cloud servers. This is the core of the article and it's basically guesswork. From all I read, I tend to believe the opposite actually. Cloud is a lot greener than home servers.

Even just applying the basic principles of efficiencies of scale, it's almost guaranteed to be true that cloud is greener.

Utility scale power, utility scale chip production, exabyte-scale storage racks, generally more efficient chips (xeons vs desktop models), more efficient server PSUs.

Not to mention less overhead like deliveries. You only need 1 truck to deliver the hardware to the data center, whereas you might need 30-50-100 to deliver computers to individual households.

> But given that a home server can run on 10W of electrical power, and potentially off of a solar panel I found this unpersuasive. I didn't have any quantitative estimates then, and still don't now.

This is laughable. It's not an argument for individual servers in households, if anything, it's an argument for utility-scale solar and more efficient software that runs efficiently on 10W CPUs.

Re: Home servers are greener than cloud

#16

Post by verdverm » Thu, Nov 21, 2019, 1:32 AM UTC

bloody-crow wrote: post #13

> I didn't have any quantitative estimates then, and still don't now. However, it's likely that a world in which there is one server per household or per street would be more electrically efficient than the current world of billionaire cloud servers. This is the core of the article and it's basically guesswork. From all I read, I tend to believe the opposite actually. Cloud is a lot greener than home servers.

If you use the Google Cloud, they run on 100% renewables

Re: Home servers are greener than cloud

#17

Post by sliken » Thu, Nov 21, 2019, 5:04 AM UTC

Largely ignored by this article is that fact that everyone needs a router. NASs are far from rare, the advantages of storage on the consumer side of a relatively slow internet connection have advantages.

So it's not really 10 watt local server vs a shared of a cloud. It should be something like 0.5 watts or similar to upgrade your home router to something that could provide internet services. Likely just double the ram and provide a microSD card for storage and that would be all you need. A 256GB microSD card, even a fast one is around $50.00.

Seems like a bit of smarts, like a CDN, or even IPFS and collectively home servers could make quite a bit of sense with close to zero power overhead.

Re: Home servers are greener than cloud

#18

Post by tzs » Thu, Nov 21, 2019, 5:15 AM UTC

tryptophan wrote: post #7

Fun fact, but CPUs/GPUs/etc are almost 100% efficient at converting electricity to heat, as they don't give off light energy like a heater would, via its glowing coils. So, theoretically, heating your house with CPUs would be greener than using central heating... If you live in a cold area, a home server's heat wouldn't be wasted, in fact it would theoretically lower your heating bill(by .01% or less, but hey!) as le…

But wait...what happens to that small amount of energy that a heating coil gives off as light? I'd expect that most of those photons end up getting absorbed by something somewhere else in the room, and ultimately the energy still ends up as heat.

Re: Home servers are greener than cloud

#19

Post by LargoLasskhyfv » Thu, Nov 21, 2019, 7:18 PM UTC

antisthenes wrote: post #15

bloody-crow wrote: post #13

> I didn't have any quantitative estimates then, and still don't now. However, it's likely that a world in which there is one server per household or per street would be more electrically efficient than the current world of billionaire cloud servers. This is the core of the article and it's basically guesswork. From all I read, I tend to believe the opposite actually. Cloud is a lot greener than home servers.

Even just applying the basic principles of efficiencies of scale, it's almost guaranteed to be true that cloud is greener. Utility scale power, utility scale chip production, exabyte-scale storage racks, generally more efficient chips (xeons vs desktop models), more efficient server PSUs. Not to mention less overhead like deliveries. You only need 1 truck to deliver the hardware to the data center, whereas you might…

And all that for running utility scale software bloat somewhere else, requiring networking infrastructure because the data isn't where it belongs. Talk about gridlock, and hick-ups because some backhoe or fat fingered admin tested the reliability of the the redundancy. As can be seen again and again when all sorts of services degrade or fail globally because some cloud experienced lightning. Instead of a single household, block, or city.

Yah, sure!

Re: Home servers are greener than cloud

#20

Post by LargoLasskhyfv » Thu, Nov 21, 2019, 8:25 PM UTC

tryptophan wrote: post #7

Fun fact, but CPUs/GPUs/etc are almost 100% efficient at converting electricity to heat, as they don't give off light energy like a heater would, via its glowing coils. So, theoretically, heating your house with CPUs would be greener than using central heating... If you live in a cold area, a home server's heat wouldn't be wasted, in fact it would theoretically lower your heating bill(by .01% or less, but hey!) as le…

There is a french company that does this in some variations:

[1] https://www.qarnot.com/