21–30 of 195 posts
Good idea, but I can't help but see this as marketing spin over the alternative title of the same story "Google: Data centers now perform LESS when the sun is not shining or the wind is not blowing"
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's probably not at the same level of granularity that Google is trying to accomplish here, but I believe that power-hungry commercial systems have tried to move to when power is cheapest for many years now. Aluminum Foundries in particular are extremely power intensive and have been run during off-peak times (or are built in areas with cheap plentiful electricity like nearby hydro-electric dams). Still, i'd love to…
Some power companies are integrating with your smart thermostat and may pre-cool in some case. Example, APS in Arizona... --- During an event, how will my thermostat be adjusted? At the start of an event, your thermostat temperature will be automatically adjusted up a few degrees above the current temperature. Each event will typically last an average of 2 hours, and will typically occur between 3 p.m. and 8 p.m.…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's probably not at the same level of granularity that Google is trying to accomplish here, but I believe that power-hungry commercial systems have tried to move to when power is cheapest for many years now. Aluminum Foundries in particular are extremely power intensive and have been run during off-peak times (or are built in areas with cheap plentiful electricity like nearby hydro-electric dams). Still, i'd love to…
Some power companies are integrating with your smart thermostat and may pre-cool in some case. Example, APS in Arizona... --- During an event, how will my thermostat be adjusted? At the start of an event, your thermostat temperature will be automatically adjusted up a few degrees above the current temperature. Each event will typically last an average of 2 hours, and will typically occur between 3 p.m. and 8 p.m.…
It seems that it must be a really difficult problem to work out the optimal solution for having spare capacity to allow time/location shifting of workloads to minimize carbon per unit of compute. This Dell paper[0] suggests that 16% of the carbon over a typical server lifecycle is from the manufacture, so you probably don't want a server sitting there unused for 23 hours per day, since the overall carbon/compute rati…
Seems like an intuitively good idea to me! It'd be great to see how effective this change was. Regardless of this change, I wonder if they share their forecasted non-renewable energy needs with their energy supplier so that the energy supplier can prepare for changes to the expected base load. Do any factories or other energy intensive operations do this?
It's probably not at the same level of granularity that Google is trying to accomplish here, but I believe that power-hungry commercial systems have tried to move to when power is cheapest for many years now. Aluminum Foundries in particular are extremely power intensive and have been run during off-peak times (or are built in areas with cheap plentiful electricity like nearby hydro-electric dams). Still, i'd love to…
Fun fact: this is a big reason why aerospace congregated in the pacific northwest during WWII (eg Boeing in Seattle).
Aluminum is key to aircraft because it's lightweight, and at the turn of the century the US went on a dam-building spree with a lot of hydro (ie large consistent baseload) being located in the pacific northwest.
COO from Tomorrow here (who provides the CO2 forecast data to Google). Happy to answer any questions!
It sounds like this project is for their own operations. Have you guys thought about how to offer this closer to a turnkey cloudops SASS / API? What kinds of abstractions would you present to developers building non-time-critical compute loads?
Could be a great differentiator for GCP vs. AWS (I have heard of some companies choosing GCP over AWS due to Google's green energy cloud). And for you guys, the only thing better than Google being a customer is all of Google's customers being your customers.
Good idea, but I can't help but see this as marketing spin over the alternative title of the same story "Google: Data centers now perform LESS when the sun is not shining or the wind is not blowing"
I don't see your point. That alternative title is exactly as accurate, so it seems like a good idea to pick the version that sounds a bit better and is easier to understand.
My point is that by tying performance to environmental factors, you get a boost when things are great but then can have troubles when things are not great. Anyone familiar with solar panels already knows this, but if the correlation is obscured, it could be surprising. The article didn't mention a specific performance gain, but if we say you get an X% performance gain when the sun is out, it also means you get a similar X% performance loss when the sun is not out. Users of the system will get used to the improvement, which becomes the new standard, and then a particularly dreary season comes in with weeks of cloud cover, and suddenly there is concern about the degradation of service.
(Like I said, it's still a good idea, it's efficient use of resources, but the PR is funny, that's all.)
COO from Tomorrow here (who provides the CO2 forecast data to Google). Happy to answer any questions!
That looks like a good opportunity for an (at least tangentinally related) big shout-out to your great electricityMap ( https://www.electricitymap.org/map ) website! I wish there would be more countries covered (in particular Switzerland), but I guess you depend on the live data being provided in these countries.
Unfortunately, the crux is data availability and reliability from system/transmission operators. For example, there is no online data available for the Northern Territory of Australia, so you can't build a parser for it. Some data providers have frequent data outages for different regions (ENTSOE), as there is no SLA or contractual obligation for providing data reliably.
If you're aware of a region that has live data available and is not yet live on electricitymap.org, please consider contributing a parser [1]! If you live in a region without live data, please consider politely requesting such data be made available through utility and system operator contacts, or explore requiring such data be made available by law (if public policy is your thing).
[1] https://github.com/tmrowco/electricitymap-contrib#adding-a-n...
One way to do it would be assign various jobs a value, (which could be dynamic e.g. it might get more important as information becomes stale) and have them bid on compute power. You could make the value virtual.
Or you could use real money. This is the premise behind EC2's spot instances. So when power is abundant, your prices drop and the relevant jobs kick off.
Using real market prices makes sense especially if you're renting out computing power, most customers will be happy to adjust workloads to save money.
Even if it's entirely internal, it's good to have a facility to "optimize for cost" and then report the savings. That's helpful to get the engineering resources devoted towards it, because "I saved $X" is a great bullet point to put in anyone's promotion packet or to base a bonus on.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's probably not at the same level of granularity that Google is trying to accomplish here, but I believe that power-hungry commercial systems have tried to move to when power is cheapest for many years now. Aluminum Foundries in particular are extremely power intensive and have been run during off-peak times (or are built in areas with cheap plentiful electricity like nearby hydro-electric dams). Still, i'd love to…
I believe some aluminum smelters can even bid into electrical markets, either directly as dispatchable load(/negative generation) or as ancillary services for grid stabilization.