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Google is investing $3.3B to build clean data centers in Europe
61–70 of 163 posts
Re: Google is investing $3.3B to build clean data centers in Europe
#62At Google Next in April, I attended a talk by the C-level in charge of Google's Datacenters, and they bragged about using machine learning to manage/anticipate their power draw, and the subsequent efficiencies those brought. They also bragged about how much they're trying to make these centers powered by renewables. When an audience member asked if they would be releasing their models that help them manage power, the…
You think you can drop a model into a new data center with a different architecture, different censors, different workloads, and it will magically save energy?
even if they didn't, seeing the limits of those models in different environments would certainly help the community overall, and if it saves a tenth of the energy it does for Google somewhere else it would be an enormous immediate reduction in energy consumption on a global scale, so it's hard to see what the downside would be.
If one was truly concerned about 'democratizing AI', as companies like Google so often claim, then sharing access to the trained models would arguably be far more effective than just sharing research papers which many companies don't even know how to implement. In fact the large majority of companies that are responsible for energy consumption don't have any data on the scale that Google has, so I would go as far as call this a bad faith deflection from the beginning.
Re: Google is investing $3.3B to build clean data centers in Europe
#63[deleted]
Re: Google is investing $3.3B to build clean data centers in Europe
#64The 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.
Re: Google is investing $3.3B to build clean data centers in Europe
#65The 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…
It is amusing how in their goal to be carbon neutral they're just heating the sea directly, cutting out the atmosphere as a middle-man. I'm not sure what the numbers on it are though. I guess heating the sea will only be once but having CO in the atmosphere will provide recurring heating.
Re: Google is investing $3.3B to build clean data centers in Europe
#66At Google Next in April, I attended a talk by the C-level in charge of Google's Datacenters, and they bragged about using machine learning to manage/anticipate their power draw, and the subsequent efficiencies those brought. They also bragged about how much they're trying to make these centers powered by renewables. When an audience member asked if they would be releasing their models that help them manage power, the…
I did a bunch of work on managing/anticipating the power draw. ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13747481 ). Something nobody talks about is how grossly wasteful & inefficient Hadoop is. There's a bunch of cited papers (https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.58... ) that study power consumption of Hadoop nodes, but nothing on how to actually reduce the consumption.
So here's something you can personally do to make a dent to this problem. Most of the Hadoop jobs that you write will involve some statistical summary over a dataset. Find the total, or the mean, median, 90th quantile, whatever. Writing a Hadoop map-reduce job is the single worst way to do this.Almost always, you can sample say a 1000 points, get a kernel density estimate via Parzen & then use a table. All quantiles, order statistics, functions of order stats...these can be hand computed for several univariate distributions & their location-scale families, and your real-life data can easily be bounded above below by these estimates. So you can get to > 95% accuracy just by hand-calculating. I can go into details if you like, but I suspect most of you already know how to do this.
Re: Google is investing $3.3B to build clean data centers in Europe
#67The 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.
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/
Re: Google is investing $3.3B to build clean data centers in Europe
#68Bravo 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 cheaper than wholesale power prices, and be fixed into the future, avoiding price fluctuations from e.g. future gas supply shocks.
Re: Google is investing $3.3B to build clean data centers in Europe
#69They might be (a lot) less bad than other data centers, but unless these google data centers have a neutral carbon footprint, they are not clean, and unless they have a negative footprint they are not "environmentally friendly".
Re: Google is investing $3.3B to build clean data centers in Europe
#70The 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.
>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.
I switched to a Chromebox as my daily driver 2 years and change ago because my bedroom would be about 1F higher than the other rooms at idle and I saw it 11F hotter one time after several hours of one of the BattleField titles running dual GPUs.
The added benefit is, even with the PC running at idle 24/7 the Chromebox would have paid for itself right around the 2 year mark in energy savings at a full load.