No need to keep it, GCHQ have a copy if you ever need it.
UK government advises deleting emails to save water
81–90 of 158 posts
Re: UK government advises deleting emails to save water
#82> Delete old emails and pictures as data centres require vast amounts of water to cool their systems. Also the UK government: > Taken together, the 50 measures will make the UK irresistible to AI firms looking to start, scale, or grow their business. It builds on recent progress in AI that saw £25 billion of new investment in data centres announced since the government took office last July. https://www.gov.uk/govern…
When George Orwell wrote 1984 it wasn’t just the Soviet Union he was criticizing.
He was also satirizing some of the most absurd parts of British political culture too. Doublethink wasn’t just part of Soviet political culture. It was part of British political culture and clearly still is based on what you just posted.
Re: UK government advises deleting emails to save water
#83I just heard this while driving, and I couldn't stop laughing at how confident the lady was in this being a solution. The storage pools will not suddenly no longer be needed because people stop syncing their devices to the cloud. It will just be used by something else. One question I had is what would replacing fresh water with saltwater be viable? We have endless amounts of saltwater that would solve the wasting fre…
I'm kind of suspicious of the water for datacenter stats, because I'm skeptical of the extent to which evaporation-based cooling is used rather than just air-to-air cooling. Wouldn't this result in visible plumes of condensation, as it does with power station cooling towers?
Also commercial water rates appear to be about £2.50 / cubic meter.
Desalination depends on electricity prices, which are fairly high in the UK at the moment.
Re: UK government advises deleting emails to save water
#84Ok I'm not a physicist but surely long term storage of pictures and emails does not actively generate heat in a data-center? Encouraging people to log on and delete old pics and emails is only going to create more heat as servers have to spin up access to stuff. The real culprit of data-center heat usage is surely AI
Storing pictures and emails in a data center does generate heat, but it is negligible. Also, claims of data center water usage are heavily overstated. Some do, but only during summer months. I assume the reason for the UK’s asinine advice is because of they think there is a link between heat generation and water usage at data centers. While a link does exist, it is not straight forward.
I have only ever toured a data center once, but the one I toured had no water usage by the cooling infrastructure as far as I could tell. However, the facility’s APUE was something like 1.7, which is high. I have read that some facilities with impressively low APUE numbers use water during particularly hot summer days, which is presumably for evaporative cooling. Unfortunately, I have yet to see one of these facilities in person to know the details beyond what has been publicly written.
If it counts for anything, I have hundreds of commits in OpenZFS. I know some things about data centers from a mix of professional contacts since my work is used in them (which is how I got the tour in the first place), and personal interest in the subject, but I am far from an expert on all aspects of how data centers work. Speaking of which, I doubt there is any one person who is an expert on all aspects of how data centers work, since the knowledge is spread across multiple types of experts. A physicist would not be my first choice of expert when asking questions about data centers. A data center technician would be a better person to ask.
Re: UK government advises deleting emails to save water
#85Data centers don't really "use" water; it gets released back into the environment one way or another. What matters is whether the data center is in a water-stressed region. According to the article: > The remaining areas are normal: Hertfordshire, London, Kent, Devon and Cornwall. So maybe the advice should be to migrate your workloads from regional data centers into London data centers.
Are you suggest they move them outside the environment? Sounds familiar.
Unfortunately this won't help as datacenters are part of the backend, not the front.
Re: UK government advises deleting emails to save water
#86I just heard this while driving, and I couldn't stop laughing at how confident the lady was in this being a solution. The storage pools will not suddenly no longer be needed because people stop syncing their devices to the cloud. It will just be used by something else. One question I had is what would replacing fresh water with saltwater be viable? We have endless amounts of saltwater that would solve the wasting fre…
Closed loop water cooling probably doesn't make a lot of sense at scale; radiators aren't very efficient at the relatively cool temperatures this sort of system would be operating at. Maybe if the water loop was cooled by refrigeration systems? That would be expensive though.
A closed loop water system by definition doesn't "use up" water! It only matters for this discussion if there's a continuous supply of new fresh water going in.
Re: UK government advises deleting emails to save water
#87This is all just so exhausting. Why can't we ask why we just treat this as an engineering issue. If there is some issue with public water supplies, how can the government build infrastructure to mitigate those issues? You see the same thing with energy generation, as though energy is some God given finite resource that we have to cherish and allocate carefully. Rather they should treat it like any other good, allow p…
I'm not an expert but it sounds like fresh water reserves across the planet are shrinking. It is a finite resource [0]. [0] https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.adx0298
Can't you invest in technologies like desalination? For instance, over 3/4 of Israel’s drinking water comes from desalination plants, mostly from the Mediterranean Sea.
Deleting emails to save water usage is not the answer
Re: UK government advises deleting emails to save water
#88Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Install a rain butt to collect rainwater to use in the garden. This assumes water is inconsistent. Once the rain butt is full, there's no more benefit. And then in a long dry season once it's emptied, it's not saving any more. > Fix a leaking toilet – leaky loos can waste 200-400 litres a day. If you're on a water meter you're already incentivised to fix this - so a better answer is water meters. > Use water from t…
I agree. Apparently the UK average daily water usage is ~140l, so "fix leaks" dwarfs all the others. If you're irrigating your garden, that's also going to be a big one, but quite often you get a hosepipe ban in the dry season anyway. Someone with a water meter should try these measures and see if they notice a difference; I bet they don't. The data center one is of course unmeasureable by the individual.
Gardens? Gardens that often cool their environments?
Tennis courts: during one of the last droughts the local tennis club kept watering their courts -- sand. The upper class twits give a F* about preserving water. Why should anybody let their plants die for those f*ers who waste it big times?
Re: UK government advises deleting emails to save water
#89Data centers don't really "use" water; it gets released back into the environment one way or another. What matters is whether the data center is in a water-stressed region. According to the article: > The remaining areas are normal: Hertfordshire, London, Kent, Devon and Cornwall. So maybe the advice should be to migrate your workloads from regional data centers into London data centers.
> Data centers don't really "use" water; it gets released back into the environment one way or another. By your definition nothing uses water as long as hydrolysis isn't involved?
Yes, water is a renewable resource, and like other renewable resources the thing we should be concerned about is not the fact that it’s used at all, but how and where it is used.
Water usage matters in water-stressed regions. In other regions, conserving other resources will matter more.
If you take the stance that data centers are bad because they use water, and thus your usage of data centers should be reduced, then you are likely to be optimizing the wrong thing in many cases.
Simplistic advice to delete emails to save water may well cause less efficient usage of resources whose conservation matters more.
Re: UK government advises deleting emails to save water
#90> Delete old emails and pictures as data centres require vast amounts of water to cool their systems.
Let's ignore that most emails will be in semi-cold storage. Let's ignore that energy usage per email would be absolutely minimum. Did they not consider that thousands of people hitting the email servers requesting to view and then subsequently delete emails, wouldn't be an issue?
What I (tongue-in-cheek) suspect is that GCHQ and the like are having difficulty in searching so many emails. Maybe by reviewing the email it triggers a filter policy which aids in searching them. After all, the Online Safety Act mostly seems to be targetting data in transit.