> because they're basically optimized to sit at a consistent level of power consumption.
Is that really so? I was under the impression that even data centers go through peak and bottom usage as do most online services.
Is that really so? I was under the impression that even data centers go through peak and bottom usage as do most online services.
A modern datacenter serving some consumer facing service likely sees a big difference in cpu usage and thus power usage between peak and off peak.
Otoh, if it's doing non-interactive data processing, it could be near 100% capacity consistently.
Personally, I'm guessing AWS has a noticable peak and trough on power. But if it makes sense, they do have the spot market which could be used to attract or repel load in order to hit a consumption target.
https://hbr.org/2001/03/harnessing-the-power-of-idle-compute...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributed.net
For a while I was in charge of the EFF Cooperating Computing Award. When it was announced, the announcement said
> However, the computer industry produces millions of new computers each year, which sit idle much of the time, running screen savers or waiting for the user to do something. EFF is encouraging people to pool their computing power over the Internet, to work together to share this massive resource.
That was in the 1990s. :-)
It's funny to think of just how inaccurate this became for subsequent CPU and chipset architecture, I guess because of convergent trends in customers wanting to save power for ecological, financial, and mobile device battery life reasons.
You are right. My previous computer was AMD Athlon, and even it near halved consumption when idle.
Modern machines extremely power saving, because desktop CPUs shared many features from Notebook platforms (for example speed step frequency change), and I see more than 6x difference of consumption of whole machine, even when I myself too conservative to use sleep/idle modes, because some programs don't behave adequate in such environment.
Sure. Even for the on-demand stuff they have a vested interest in reducing power consumption as much as they can.
They charge the customers a flat rate per hour, so every joule they can cut out is money in their pocket.
It would be different if they were charging the customers by the kwH or something.
Some time, before CDN invention, very large sites distributed traffic between few time zones around world and so they distributed load for a whole 24h. But when CDNs appeared, local peaks returned.
And unfortunately, not much things possible to run at classic DC environment, nearly only ML tasks. For example, for classic supercomputing tasks, typical DCs have too slow network (too large latency for things like C++ MPI).
The trick is that you sign a contract with the utility to guarantee a particular type of usage - and utilities love people who burn Watt-hours rather then Volt-Amps (i.e. a power factor near 1) since they're a lot easier to service, and people who promise to use power fairly consistently.
The utility says "we'll give you a lower overall rate, provided you promise to consume at least this much electricity" - in practice of course, you could consume less but you'll pay for it no matter what.
But compute is great for this model: it's fast to move applications onto and off servers, so hitting that minimum is easy.
Because when the sun is up over the Pacific ocean, everyone is asleep, and all of your datacenters are quiet.
You just have to be sure to make the spot stuff juuust unreliable enough that people can’t run their full workloads on it all the time.