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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

#101

Post by Sharlin »

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?

To very good approximation, 100% of the energy used by a contemporary computer is turned to heat. The amount of negentropy generated by the computations is utterly dwarfed by the increase in entropy in the computer's surroundings. Computers are space heaters that happen to do some calculations as a side effect.

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

#102

Post by rypskar »

davedx wrote: post #64
nabla9 wrote: post #30

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…

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.

This is one of the reasons why I only run BOINC on CPUs during summer and on GPUs and CPUs the rest of the year. My 10 year old i7 have been running 100% mostly 24/7 for 10 years with no problem, while 2-3 graphics cards have given because of the heat

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

#103

Post by jasonvorhe »

1-6 wrote: post #83
bt848 wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just like basically this biggest nit ever, but Snowden revelations didn't reveal anything and nothing was described in them. Snowden exfiltrated a bunch of powerpoints that neither he nor you nor I can understand out of context. The most supportable conclusion you can really glean from Snowden's slide decks is the US intelligence agencies were able to intercept traffic of undersea cables.

Fiber is encrypted you know...

They weren't back then. Google had plans but they didn't start yet. They prioritised that after the leaks. Now they are encrypted.

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

#105

Post by jsingleton »

rabscuttler wrote: post #68

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…

Google deservedly get the best rating in this cloud whitepaper: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1eCCb3rgqtQxcRwLdTr0P_hCK...

Ahead of Azure and way ahead of AWS/Oracle/IBM.

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

#106

Post by 05 »

nabla9 wrote: post #30

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...

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

#107

Post by rightbyte »

Sharlin wrote: post #101
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?

To very good approximation, 100% of the energy used by a contemporary computer is turned to heat. The amount of negentropy generated by the computations is utterly dwarfed by the increase in entropy in the computer's surroundings. Computers are space heaters that happen to do some calculations as a side effect.

I wonder if WD and friends do generative braking on the hard drives.

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

#108

Post by bt848 »

Zenst wrote: post #85
cheez wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google has insane optimization for power consumption at data centers, if there is something you can think of, they will have either done it or will be trying it.

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 Open Rack 48V-to-point-of-load scheme that uses an in-rack DC UPS.

https://www.opencompute.org/files/External-2018-OCP-Summit-G...

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

#110

Post by amelius »

PerryCox wrote: post #20
JohnJamesRambo wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just make something good and useful and don’t kill it and you will be exceeding Google in so many areas. Think marathon, not sprint.

Yeah this is a good point, if you have a product with good support, that's one way you can out compete them.

But don't be too successful, or you'll be copied by them.
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