Some data centers are noisy neighbors
washingtonpost.com
washingtonpost.com
Okay, so the real issue is inadequate regulation. Amazon is many negative things but one thing they will do always is stick to the minimum effort required to adhere to the law. Want to change their behavior? Change the law. Enact noise abatement requirements and they will make it happen.
So at the end, you either need much more heat exchangers, make some noise, reduce capacity or invent better cooling tech.
So, changing the law is not enough. You need to motivate right people to innovate, too.
Also, on US; good luck trying to change their behaviors through law. This is why companies have lobbyists.
Disclosure: HPC admin sitting on top of a datacenter.
> Making things very expensive is precisely how to motivate people to innovate.
That statement has no caveats around persuasion and appeals to conscience.
"That's a bad way to motivate innovation" still begs the question of what would actually be better in the real world for cases where sufficient motivation is currently lacking. The case where no "spur" is needed isn't even interesting in this context.
I just took the statement as written and wrote a brief comment on it, without reading anything else into it.
Yes, you were, whether you acknowledge it or not. You can't just ignore the existing context and expect everyone to follow you into a new one that you supposedly created out of nowhere. That's not only the height of hubris, but it's also not how curious conversation works. Please see the guidelines.
I have seen the guidelines, and nowhere do I see DonHopkins' mouth-frothing or your arbitrary rule-setting there.
I appreciate that now you've read my comment in its correct context (that of the previous comment) you understand it and aren't trying to say anything in response other than some brand new iron laws of conversation and DonHopkins' gossipy nastiness, as that hopefully means you've at least accepted it for what it is. A simple truthful statement, designed to modify the predecessor which was not, in my opinion, sufficiently caveated.
If you don't want to operate a business that deals with those costs, move or don't build a data center.
This kind of policy does not accomplish the cost-shifting you talk about. Rather, a cost-shifting policy looks like: "in Maricopa county, a business may make as much noise as it likes, but must pay fees to the owner of any plot of land which has its ambient noise levels raised in the amount of $X per Y decibels per minute per square meter experiencing increased noise. "
I'm not aware of much regulation in the latter vein, at least not where I live. But it has the advantage of cost shifting, from ANY business, to those affected by the negative externality. That reinternalizes the cost without hampering freedom of businesses to operate in whatever way most efficiently accomplishes their goals, and helps C-suite execs see the true cost of their operations, which incentivizes them to innovate that cost away. It's also not specific to the cause of the noise, so church bells pay the same as the data center which pays the same as the glass factory which pays the same as the concert venue.
My $0.02 anyway.
Vote notdonspaulding 2024!
One of the reasons the Kennedy Expressway in downtown Chicago is zoned for skyscrapers on both sides is to block the traffic noise from getting into the rest of the area.
And even with all of that it's not great.
Edit: funny enough, we had a similar situation with a rural gun range. In that case, at least, when they built the suburban neighbourhood next door the buyers did have a clause in the purchase contract that acknowledged that they were purchasing property next to an existing range and that there would be noise. They were generally fine with it until the national police force started renting the range and doing full-auto practice on Saturday mornings :D
It's mostly about power. You can't just select a place and say "I want 5MW (or 10MW) of electricity, just here".
Fiber is thin, easy to lay down and flexible. Power cables are not. Also power planning is apparently hard.
Also worth noting, blamazon (parent commentator) seems to work for Amazon (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25758868), or at least previously worked for them so probably sitting on a bunch of AMZN stock, but they never disclosed that, so might want to take their positive views of Amazon with a bit of salt.
https://dlg.usg.edu/record/gsu_mhross_8075?canvas=3&x=628&y=...
Interesting to see the Unions vs. Communism messaging.
Regulations also need to have consequences and enforcement, but the companies can lobby to reduce or eliminate those elements when politicians are drafting new regulations.
I think the general public believes that simply making it illegal will be sufficient; it is not, but that perception is what permits corporations to get away with this kind of political tampering.
Sounds to me like a case of plain bad zoning. Here in Germany, no way that would slide for new zoning - you can't zone noise-generating industry next to residential or mixed zone areas, you need a buffer (usually either undeveloped land or offices) between them.
> But the ordinance exempts air conditioners, which are what the data center cooling systems and exhaust fans technically are.
And that one a case of plain bad noise emissions regulations.
As usual, regulation is widely seen as "why do we need it"... until it affects people personally and all of a sudden they see why regulation is needed. Or to put it bluntly: Who would have thought that a face-eating leopard eats faces?
1: https://mises.org/wire/when-pollution-violation-property-rig... 2: https://mises.org/library/law-property-rights-and-air-pollut...
Simple. I make my smokestacks really tall so the pollution is emitted very high into the air and has dispersed massively before some of it reaches any particular property. All the other factory owners do that too both locally and far away.
Someone comes after me for violating their property rights by polluting their air...and I get off because they can't prove causality. Yes, my factory emitted pollutant X, but so did hundreds of other factories both near mine and hundreds of miles away and everywhere in between. They can't prove that any detectable amount of my pollution actually ended up in their air.
Most of the time your air conditioner is not going to bother your neighbors despite being louder than what is normally allowed because most of the time when you need your air condition the neighbors won't hear it because they are also using their air conditioners.
What they missed was that business air conditioning needs are different and they might run air conditioners at times when no residents would be doing so and that businesses might a lot of air conditioners.
At the same time, I am glad that these NIMBYs and suburbanites get a small taste of what happens when decades of "not in my backyard" and car centric policy comes to bite them in the ass. Nobody wants to be next to the "noisy" data center, but at the same time everybody wants access to the internet. If we had sane city design in the United States of America which emphasized density, walkability, alternative forms of transportation, and accessible and highly available public transportation. Nobody would care if a data center is out in the middle of nowhere.
But this is the good ole US of A, where everyone must have a car. Everyone must have their 8000 sq ft fiefdom. Everywhere needs to be accessible by a 2 ton death machine.
They are pushing 3 tons now; F-150's are topping out at nearly 7,000lbs!
https://www.edmunds.com/car-news/2022-gmc-hummer-ev-range-ba...
(It's also not the whole story. Consumer demand for big plays a significant role.)
They're even adding a bike and walk link to the carmall on the outskirts of town, connecting it with the rest of the city on a traffic separated trail.
Meanwhile, in Seattle it was 2 miles to get to the grocery store and took all day while dealing with city car traffic.
The problem isn't "car centric" design, the problem is that nobody is designing anything at all.
Walkscore isn't a realistic measure of anything.
I once lived in a place with a Walkscore of 80+. Looking at the details of the score, it was largely because Walkscore counts pornography shops as bookstores.
Along those lines, I imagine Walkscore also counts peep shows as movie theaters, and strip clubs as general family entertainment centers.
Meanwhile, in Seattle it was 2 miles to get to the grocery store and took all day while dealing with city car traffic.
When I lived in Seattle, I didn't even own a car. I could get everywhere I need to on a bus, or train, or walking. Perhaps you have a different definition of "downtown" than where I lived. If you were two miles away from the Whole Foods on Westlake, then you weren't downtown.
My experience living in Seattle was that it was hard to live in a place where there wasn't a small commercial district within a few blocks. Seattle does wonderfully with mixing small commercial into residential zones.
I mostly just hoofed it everywhere, but it did limit my access substantially.
Meanwhile, unless it's very cold or I'm going to a different city I have much less of a need for a car in my more rural locale.
Why not? I lived in Seattle for years without a car, before Uber was even invented. Get an Orca card, and a ZipCar subscription for once-a-month trips. Problem solved.
Went to SoDo a fair bit and that was always an extreme chore despite the short distance.
Walking .8 to whole foods and back with a weeks worth of groceries wasn't unlivable or anything, but I had to pay 50% more for food to even get that close.
Today, I walk like a quarter mile for groceries basically whenever I'd like and don't have to deal with city traffic.
The point is not Seattle bad or transit bad, the point is that despite a design with many more "car centric" elements, I have an easier time walking and biking here than I did there - so you can't lay all urban problems at the feet of cars and assume that pro density urbanism magically fixes them.
The downside is that instead of being exposed to noise from data centers, you're exposed to noise from nearby buildings, neighbors, transit, etc. We get plenty of work in city centers from folks annoyed by noisy neighbors (residential and commercial).
You're not wrong about the US needing to better emphasize density, but it's not a panacea.
It's worse than that. In his proposed carless utopia where everyone lives in high density housing and walks or bikes or takes public transit, the data centers would be built in the city because that's where the workers are. They wouldn't built them out in the middle of nowhere because public transit generally is not going to go to the middle of nowhere.
And indeed, checking their other comments they also want to greatly reduce parking spaces for cars in cities. That would make it so most people in cities could not own cars, and greatly raise the cost of parking for those that do own cars meaning cars could probably be owned by people in the top income groups.
So I think my inference that the type of city they are advocating would be one where data center employees would very likely not have cars, and so data centers would not be in the middle of nowhere.
The hardware architecture is not the problem. How we use the hardware accounts for most of the waste you see today.
Less containerization and more in-process SQLite would have a dramatic impact on the # of servers out there.
Light travels 300 kilometers in 1 millisecond; we're talking one millisecond additional latency to be outside of most metro areas, two or three and we're in unpopulated rural areas for sure.
Of course you can do the latter if you have unlimited capital, but most companies choose the path of least resistance.
Don't know what the walkability argument is supposed to mean though: Amsterdam is famously walkable and cyclable, yet there are quite a few data centers right next to the center of the city; same goes for London.
Cooling efficiency and efficiency of power distribution circuits are some of the biggest impacts on energy usage. The most energy-efficient datacenters today use liquid cooling vats for their computers, which are much more efficient than air cooling but come with tons of other problems.
Nobody cares if a data center is out in the middle of nowhere with the current American city design.
The article is about data centers that are not in the middle of nowhere.
I don't know if its just the operator's decisions in design or zoning requirements that makes that reality for me, but almost all the data centers aren't exceptionally loud from outside the facility grounds.
Of course there are people who complain on the local nextdoor but data centers are a big source of revenue for Loudoun county.
https://www.wusa9.com/article/news/verify/loudoun-county-fis...
I'm very interested in watching this play out locally.
> Local jurisdictions can tax the value of the computer equipment inside the buildings without having to provide many government services — giving Northern Virginia a steady stream of funds that, officials say, can go toward schools or affordable housing.
That will get the problem "solved" by datacenters leaving.
https://www.datacenterknowledge.com/power-and-cooling/data-c...
I also saw a post where a guy was using Bitcoin mining to heat his outdoor pool in the winter. Couldn't find that one with a quick search but it's definitely out there if you want to dig.
Thanks for sharing.
https://www.cnx-software.com/2023/02/15/install-a-server-in-...