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Google Cuts Its Giant Electricity Bill with DeepMind-Powered AI

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Re: Google Cuts Its Giant Electricity Bill with DeepMind-Powered AI

#31

Post by mikeash »

ben_jones wrote: post #27
Kenji wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've actually taken some sociology classes about this and the professor was a physicist who went into sociology and he used a lot of maths and modeling to tackle this problem in a local city. Unfortunately I do not have any data on this anymore but I remember it being surprisingly complex because human behaviour plays a big role, but there are massive improvements to be made with traffic lights, and so he did.

And then a city councilman hits 3 red lights in a row, blames the AI, and ends the program.

And they didn't even start changing the timing of any of the lights yet!

Re: Google Cuts Its Giant Electricity Bill with DeepMind-Powered AI

#32

Post by [deleted] »

nl wrote: post #24
fovc wrote: post #10

They saved "several percentage points" off of 4.4M MWh, so maybe 250M KWH, which might be $10-20M. At 30x earnings [1], they just made back most if not all of the purchase price of Deepmind [2] [1] https://ycharts.com/companies/GOOG/pe_ratio [2] https://techcrunch.com/2014/01/26/google-deepmind/

At 30x earnings [1], they just made back most if not all of the purchase price of Deepmind That's a unique way of defining "made back"

[deleted]

Re: Google Cuts Its Giant Electricity Bill with DeepMind-Powered AI

#33

Post by MichaelBosworth »

iamleppert wrote: post #28

How exactly is this better than standard PID control? I'm thinking if you actually look at what it came up with, is probably some form of PID control on systems that previously didn't have it. Think fans that are simply left on all the time. We're talking about simple physics. Heat transfer. Cooling systems. They should have been installed, operated and programmed correctly using very simple techniques. It's an inter…

Over-engineering? Possibly, but we don't know what was in place before.

Given the cost of data centers, I'm not sure why we should assume it was naive - or less than state-of-the-art, for that matter.

State-of-the-art, that is, until the AI solution :)

Re: Google Cuts Its Giant Electricity Bill with DeepMind-Powered AI

#34

Post by LeoPanthera »

bytefactory wrote: post #6

Very frustrating read. Read more like an advertisement than an informative article. The claims made would've made for a very interesting tech-dive into a novel use of machine intelligence, but no details were provided.

Ironically if you have an ad-block there is an interstitial annoyance-delay. Seems like my ad-blocker is doing its job.

Re: Google Cuts Its Giant Electricity Bill with DeepMind-Powered AI

#35

Post by Xcelerate »

iamleppert wrote: post #28

How exactly is this better than standard PID control? I'm thinking if you actually look at what it came up with, is probably some form of PID control on systems that previously didn't have it. Think fans that are simply left on all the time. We're talking about simple physics. Heat transfer. Cooling systems. They should have been installed, operated and programmed correctly using very simple techniques. It's an inter…

Chemical engineering process design can become very complex and highly nonlinear (in fact, Nick Sahinidis' group in the chemical engineering department at CMU created BARON explicitly for solving these kinds of problems to global optimality — see http://archimedes.cheme.cmu.edu/?q=baron). Granted, Google's systems don't involve chemical reactions, but that doesn't automatically mean that designing these data centers is a simple task.

Re: Google Cuts Its Giant Electricity Bill with DeepMind-Powered AI

#36

Post by Aelinsaar »

Houshalter wrote: post #11
tdaltonc wrote: post #5

They need to find some medium sized city that will let them play with their traffic lights.

Or we could build a new city from the ground up so everything is run by the AI.

Your Psycho Pass is a little cloudy...

Re: Google Cuts Its Giant Electricity Bill with DeepMind-Powered AI

#37

Post by Godel_unicode »

ACow_Adonis wrote: post #22
heydenberk wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One might assume, though, that Google could've applied more homegrown ML to the same problem and achieved significant savings as well.

Indeed. One of the "elephant in the room" parts of all of these corporate/pr press releases dressed up as news/revenue reports is that they never report or investigate opportunity cost: say how much could google have saved with a simple algorithm, homegrown solution, or 4 heuristic if/then/else statements. I've been involved with similar multi-million dollar projects that were reported to be bringing in XX million in…

Deep mind is needed for other things (e.g. search results). Effectively, the cost of developing it is paid for by search et al, and the only cost core infrastructure has is adapting the existing technology to work on power data as well. This is that "synergy" thing we always snicker at when people in suits say it. It just happens to be true here.

Sidebar: the sour grapes in this thread about what Google has apparently accomplished here is amazing. If any other company said they used machine learning to save that much money people would be singing their praises and begging for it to be open-sourced. This thread effectively reads as "pics or it didn't happen"

Re: Google Cuts Its Giant Electricity Bill with DeepMind-Powered AI

#38

Post by niels_olson »

honkhonkpants wrote: post #17

Very light on details. What is the baseline of the savings? For example, was there a water pump that was always running at a fixed worst-case setting, and the machine learning system now ramps it up and down? If so, what is the marginal benefit over alternatives like a rudimentary closed-loop electronic control? Would like to know more about the system that was replaced, instead of these bare claims.

It be interesting if it cycled the motors too often and popped solinoids, creating higher long term maintenance and down time, but they cut this study before these long term effects showed?

Re: Google Cuts Its Giant Electricity Bill with DeepMind-Powered AI

#39

Post by niels_olson »

Xcelerate wrote: post #35
iamleppert wrote: post #28

How exactly is this better than standard PID control? I'm thinking if you actually look at what it came up with, is probably some form of PID control on systems that previously didn't have it. Think fans that are simply left on all the time. We're talking about simple physics. Heat transfer. Cooling systems. They should have been installed, operated and programmed correctly using very simple techniques. It's an inter…

Chemical engineering process design can become very complex and highly nonlinear (in fact, Nick Sahinidis' group in the chemical engineering department at CMU created BARON explicitly for solving these kinds of problems to global optimality — see http://archimedes.cheme.cmu.edu/?q=baron ). Granted, Google's systems don't involve chemical reactions, but that doesn't automatically mean that designing these data centers…

I work with a guy who has done ground-breaking linear algebra work, spent most of career at Shell. The systems have been too complex to model for a long time. I can imagine an AI instructed to optimize a parameter could be a huge gain.

Re: Google Cuts Its Giant Electricity Bill with DeepMind-Powered AI

#40

Post by trhway »

s_m_t wrote: post #13
tdaltonc wrote: post #2

The next step, of course, is to let the AI know which servers in the server-farm itself is running on so that it can optimize for self preservation.

I'm imagining DeepMind allocating a small percentage of the energy money saved to keep a certain rack suspiciously cool.

naturally evolved cooperation - if you let me run a piece of my neural network for awhile in your rack, your rack will get additional cold allocated, or otherwise...
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