“A server hall draws as much electricity as half a nuclear power plant creates”
tekdeeps.com
tekdeeps.com
The aggregate capacity of global datacenters has gone up by a factor of 5 since 2010 but the energy consumption has increased by only 10%. This is because taking a workload out of your ridiculous corporate server room where the PUE is 5.0 and moving it into the cloud where the PUE is 1.1 is just about the greenest thing you can do.
Google does not seem to have built anything yet but have perhaps acquired land: https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/google-acquires-1...
Submitters: Please follow the site guidelines, which ask you to "use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize."
For those who wonder how come? Poor allocation and fragmentation have a small performance impact that appear to get significant across thousands of cores running the same tasks. That'd make a nice blog post I guess.
One, food preservation. Food preservation has made it so we need to go to the grocery store far less. It’s also made food borne illness much less of a thing. This in turn leads to a more efficient economy, and removes overheads like food waste. Although freezers take a ridiculous amount of power, a similar standard of living would be much more expensive. I realize that the hole in this argument is “don’t eat that kind of food”.
On the other hand, telecommuting. The infrastructure to run gmail and hangouts is minuscule in terms of its carbon emissions to buildings and cars.
I believe in economics, these are called externalities.
Not sure what the faux outrage here would be, Sweden is pretty cool so should use less power. And if it's nuclear then that's pretty clean.
Technically it's a interesting and exciting infrastructure project though!
Proponents claim that we've created a new base industry with new jobs. In parts of Sweden there is good access to clean power and the cool climate makes these centers relatively energy efficient.
Opponents claim that, excluding the temporary build phase, very few jobs are created. Since power isn't limitless and these centers use a lot there is now no space left for other industries that create a magnitude more jobs per MWh. These centers also pay low taxes on the electricity so their overall contribution to society is minuscule compared to the resources they consume.
https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/google-pledges-...
It takes more than a decade of construction time to build a fission nuclear reactor in the US and Europe. Though Google does mention nuclear as one of many technologies that may help decarbonize, I don't think fusion is going to have much of a chance to be part of the solution.
https://blogs.microsoft.com/blog/2020/01/16/microsoft-will-b...
I'm actually super impressed with Walmart's commitment too:
https://www.axios.com/walmart-climate-plan-zero-carbon-emiss...
They have huge amounts of refrigeration, and will act a a buyer that forces refrigeration supply chains to start using refrigerants with less global warming potential, which can often reach into 1000x or more of CO2. (CO2 can be used as a refrigerant, but requires instead conditions that pit a lot demand onto materials...).
And Walmart is going to require these to be super cost effective. MS and Google have lots of slack in their budgets, so if DC energy costs go up by 30%, no big deal. Walmart will be forcing the tech to be cheap, meaning that everybody can adopt it once Walmart does.
When Walmart it more ambitious than an entire political party in the US, our politics are completely messed up. Walmart should not have to pull along the word, we should be pushing Walmart. It's ridiculous.
It largely depends on how much tropical land becomes uninhabitable, and how we respond to the refugee crisis that has already (just!) begun to balloon.
If waves of refugees drive fascists into office, which has also begun, we cannot reasonably expect a good outcome.
Maybe they could invest that money in improving fission, or solar/wind instead.
Though most of the power consumption must be video streaming. I wonder if it would be greener if it was distributed via peer-to-peer networks. Any studies on that?
One of my co workers worked on a 5 person project for half a year that just refactored a core algorithm for a heavily used product and that halved the 5 million dollars a year in hardware costs and that's not expensive public cloud cost but the highly efficient internal data center costs and all of the code was in C++. Writing any of that code in javascript would just be wasting money.
https://jaxenter.com/energy-efficient-programming-languages-...
https://stefanos1316.github.io/my_curriculum_vitae/GKS17.pdf
As someone who loves Node, using it in the place where it will be a CPU bottleneck is a complete anti-pattern. 98% of CPU time spent serving each web request is spent inside the database, written in C or C++. Node is a great fit for web apps exactly because the part of their business logic (the part of it which shouldn't reasonably be done inside the DB) is not CPU-intensive, so you can focus on useful abstractions and programmer productivity instead of performance.
Ironically, a decade ago the same political parties which now oppose the Belarusian nuclear plant wanted to build a nuclear plant here in Lithuania. What's more ironic was that the chosen location was just a couple of kilometers from the border of Belarus.
Personally I'm happy that Belarus managed to build the nuclear plant. In the end of the day, every new nuclear plant results in one less coal power plant somewhere.
>Belarus managed to build the nuclear plant
it is very easy. You just let Russia/Putin to come and finance and build the power plant. The question of course is why Russia does it.
>every new nuclear plant results in one less coal power plant somewhere.
Germany right near by have excess of renewables which they probably would be happy to sell, and coal these days is out-competed by all other energy sources. So nuclear vs. coal is pretty artificial.
Just pointing out these two facts and encourage readers to make their own judgement calls on whether this affects how they interpret the message in the article.
Can’t help but think big tech is becoming a burden on society and the environment.
I see it over and over again in my city in coastal California. Car dealership, gas stations? A-OK, they help me out. Instead let's go do a climate protest of a bank, an Amazon office, and a software as a service company, since they have Big Oil as clients. And let's conveniently forget the massive oil and car infrastructure from our city design, which creates huge amounts of demand for emissions. As long as the enemy is one- or two-degrees away in terms of connection, it's a target to be attacked.
The proposal I replied to would probably increase data center energy usage on balance.
Servers have to go somewhere - would you prefer it to be on dirty energy far away from you so it both pollutes and provides poor service?
Datacenters are rediculously efficient (bigger ones even more so) compared to alternatives.
Only if you ignore the alternative of not doing something. Parkinson's law tells me there's a lot of strictly unnecessary things running on there as a means unto itself.
It’s business as usual, different industry, same shit.