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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

#41

Post by Seirdy »

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…

On a smaller scale, you could do what Low Tech Magazine [0] does and actually have downtime when sunlight is low. Since this doesn't happen too often and users can just save articles (with RSS, email newsletters, etc.), websites like this can just be powered by a single computer, solar cell, and small battery in the owner's Barcelona apartment. Thanks to small static pages and tiny dithered images, the site is almost always up.

The future doesn't always need to be as "webscale" as Google; sometimes, scaling down is the smart thing to do. The minimal approach of LTM is the technology equivalent of riding a bicycle (or electric velomobile [1]) to work instead of driving.

[0]: https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com

[1]: https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/2012/10/electric-velomobil...

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

#42

Post by ip26 »

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…

Two possibly examples-

- Spawn nightly regressions when wind power starts to pick up, instead of at some arbitrary wall clock time

- Dispatch compute-heavy jobs during low energy cost times; dispatch IO-heavy or memory-limited jobs during high cost times.

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

#43

Post by mav3rick »

rcMgD2BwE72F wrote: post #40

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...

Is all your consumption from renewable sources ?

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

#44

Post by skybrian »

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…

It's good to an extent, but if optimization for cost gets too intense then it will seek out the flaws in market rules. This will be true whether machines or humans are doing the optimizing.

I guess it's okay as long as the people making the rules have good monitoring and are watching out for weird exploits and fixing them. The flexibility to change the rules tends to be more common internally than externally where customers want more guarantees.

As we've seen, there also needs to be a balance between cost-optimization and preparedness. If the wind patterns don't match the prediction then you need to be ready for that.

Also, as we've seen with cryptocurrency, real money attracts theft. A human-adjusted credit system is better. In the real world, this looks like support having the discretion to forgive big bills. But to do that they need to know their customers. It's hard to automate.

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

#45

Post by jdm2212 »

rcMgD2BwE72F wrote: post #40

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...

Why would AI solutions help the fossil fuel industry burn more oil and gas? The fossil fuel industry sells oil and gas to others to burn, it doesn't light the stuff up itself for fun.

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

#46

Post by heavenlyblue »

Seirdy wrote: post #41
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…

On a smaller scale, you could do what Low Tech Magazine [0] does and actually have downtime when sunlight is low. Since this doesn't happen too often and users can just save articles (with RSS, email newsletters, etc.), websites like this can just be powered by a single computer, solar cell, and small battery in the owner's Barcelona apartment. Thanks to small static pages and tiny dithered images, the site is almost…

This is actually great: imagine a CDN in various geographical locations all of which work off sunlight in their own time zone (and turn off with no sunlight).

This way you can have 24/7 fully green content delivery to consumers.

Although that being said we could just try to cover the earth with as many generators everywhere and then fully connect the grids.

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

#48

Post by barney54 »

chickenpotpie wrote: post #39
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.

I think this has very little to do with a carbon tax and everything about external and internal marketing. They are committed to using renewable power.

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

#49

Post by pbhjpbhj »

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…

In the UK households used to be able to get economy 7 electricity, which meant cheap electricity at night (I'd guess for 7 hours?).

I've wanted to have realtime pricing like that for a while, it seems to be becoming available again.

I honestly thought that was what the advanced electricity meter roll-out was going to do; but it seems not.

More direct energy cost to service price charged seems like a good thing in general.

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

#50

Post by blibble »

pbhjpbhj wrote: post #49
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…

In the UK households used to be able to get economy 7 electricity, which meant cheap electricity at night (I'd guess for 7 hours?). I've wanted to have realtime pricing like that for a while, it seems to be becoming available again. I honestly thought that was what the advanced electricity meter roll-out was going to do; but it seems not. More direct energy cost to service price charged seems like a good thing in gen…

https://octopus.energy/agile/
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