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Our data centers now work harder when the sun shines and wind blows

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Re: Our data centers now work harder when the sun shines and wind blows

#31

Post by floatrock »

floatrock wrote: post #26
martincollignon wrote: post #5

COO from Tomorrow here (who provides the CO2 forecast data to Google). Happy to answer any questions!

Great collab with Google! They've been probably the most serious corporate wrt getting all-renewable offsets for their operations... this is helping them reach the next milestone where the renewable offsets are time-matched. Great example of being serious about this stuff rather than just greenwashing. It sounds like this project is for their own operations. Have you guys thought about how to offer this closer to a t…

Also, how can we avoid the potential for unintended consequences where this tech makes Google "greener" while GCP users become less green?

If a data center has (roughly, to a first-order approximation) fixed compute capacity at any point in time, and we assume that any capacity not being used by Google themselves is made available to GCP, then wouldn't Google reserving the "green" hours for themselves drive the remaining "dirty" hours onto the GCP spot markets?

Is there a cloud market design that addresses this tension between maximizing utilization and having desirable or 'premium' compute hours?

Re: Our data centers now work harder when the sun shines and wind blows

#32

Post by beckingz »

thebigshane wrote: post #27
jorams wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Of course its a better idea to pick the version that sounds better. That's what I said; I know both are accurate. 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 specifi…

Encouraging and incentivizing compute/electricity demand to be time flexible provides the opportunity for cost savings and emissions reductions.

The greater the flexibility, the greater the savings when demand can be smoothed out to better allocate resources and allow easier forecasting.

If compute jobs that are run on demand can be deferred a few hours and run during a time period, that allows resources to better utilized. Like charging an EV overnight, but better.

Re: Our data centers now work harder when the sun shines and wind blows

#33

Post by skummetmaelk »

floatrock wrote: post #25
Klathmon wrote: post #7

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…

> 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). 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-b…

Another fun fact: in 2018 the US produced 890,000 tons of Aluminium. Iceland (population ~350,000) produced 870,000 tons.

Re: Our data centers now work harder when the sun shines and wind blows

#34

Post by mschuster91 »

beckingz wrote: post #30
plorg wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That's awesome. Do you have a source for that?

At least in Germany some huge consumers (cement mills, huge refrigerated warehouses) are classified as "Lastabwurfkunden" ("load shedding customers"), where the grid operation center can remotely shut them down. Information is scarce as Google has a lot of copies of the Wikipedia article trashing the results, but at least I found an insurance company that asks if the applicant is classified as such (http://www.energyprotect.eu/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/Risik...).

Re: Our data centers now work harder when the sun shines and wind blows

#35

Post by shadowgovt »

bizzleDawg wrote: post #18

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…

Carbon consumed in building a server is sunk cost and would be paid independent of whether the server does any kind of carbon-footprint-aware load shifting.

Assuming the server is "sitting unused for 23 hours a day" is the wrong model for what this work changed. You're assuming the server could be running at 50% duty cycle vs. 100% duty cyle. It isn't; since we're talking the batch load, there's a roughly fixed amount of low-priority work to be done and doubling the amount of CPU active-duty time alotted to doing the work doesn't get the work done faster (the details on that are complicated, but that's the right model for what Google's describing here). One should model the duty cycle as fixed relative to the processor (i.e. "This global datacenter architecture, over the course of its life, will do a fixed N units of computronium work on these batch tasks") and then ask whether that work should be done using coal to power the electrons or wind.

Re: Our data centers now work harder when the sun shines and wind blows

#36

Post by shadowgovt »

While the green angle on this story is definitely good to highlight, I wonder if they're seeing any cost savings too?

Solar and wind on the grid increase supply, which should drive down price per KwH (of course, the equation isn't quite that simple, since demand in most of the world near human population centers is also highest during the day).

Re: Our data centers now work harder when the sun shines and wind blows

#37

Post by bo1024 »

ben509 wrote: post #29

Optimizing for this is a perfect task to throw at a simple market. Especially because actually reworking the software to take advantage of resources at different times is often going to require a decent amount of work by engineers. 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…

Yes! Especially when you have multiple data centers participating in different locations. It might be cloudy in one place but not another, so jobs get re-routed accordingly.

Re: Our data centers now work harder when the sun shines and wind blows

#38

Post by user5994461 »

sambroner wrote: post #4

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?

Having worked in a factory before, I can tell you that the factory was calling the electricity company before shutting down or turning on the factory. It is consuming a noticeable chunks out of what the whole surrounding city is consuming.

Given how much electricity a datacenter consumes. Google surely must have a direct support contact within the electricity provider and they better start working both ways, if they don't already.

Quick math. A datacenter is 60 000 servers, so 6 MW consumption at 100 W per server (moderate load). That is 1% of the peak output of a nuclear reactor. You bet the electric company wants to know when they need to adjust their reactors.

Re: Our data centers now work harder when the sun shines and wind blows

#39

Post by chickenpotpie »

shadowgovt wrote: post #36

While the green angle on this story is definitely good to highlight, I wonder if they're seeing any cost savings too? Solar and wind on the grid increase supply, which should drive down price per KwH (of course, the equation isn't quite that simple, since demand in most of the world near human population centers is also highest during the day).

The pessimist in me says that they're only doing this in case a carbon tax passes, they'll be able to keep their pricing competitive.

Re: Our data centers now work harder when the sun shines and wind blows

#40

Post by rcMgD2BwE72F »

I hope this doesn't add to much cost to their cloud customers' bills.

They've worked so hard to sell their AI solutions to the fossil fuel industry, lately, so they can help them extract and burn more oil and gas[0].

[0] https://www.vox.com/recode/2020/1/3/21030688/google-amazon-a...

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