Hacker News Reader

Comment by cbmuser | Hacker News Reader

»Don't understand why.«

Because you cannot turn a large datacenter with thousands of aggregates, power supplies and so on off and on like a toaster.

View on HN

You totally can. I've seen cases a rat gnawed a circuit breaker and blacked out a DC. Fires too. It's not an industrial manufacturing facility. Computers can just be shut off and on. There's also nothing needed to bootstrap the other parts like cooling etc.

A rat taking out a DC resulting in a black start event isn't the same thing as being able to turn a DC on and off at will. The thousands of computers in an DC running various bits of software don't just power on like your Windows computer and result in a working data center after a couple of minutes automatically.

Datacenters literally have UPS power supplies to let them gracefully shutdown and start up.

A 4 hour grid battery and a weather forecast would easily let a training run follow energy availability.

when the GPU capex overshadows everything else your idle hardware is burning enormous amounts of money

Are the UPSes actual batteries or just backup generators? If they're generators then that defeats the point. If they're batteries then it's kinda just regular solar then?

But that's the point. It's not like a solar DC would suddenly lose power because of cloud cover. Large scale batteries can provide amble ride through inclement weather to allow a graceful shutdown, and weather forecasts at that scale are accurate enough to predictively model your energy availability.

AI training is unique because it's not interactive workload serving.

I totally can. And if it's powered by solar (low inertia) there's less obligations to supply side, solar panels will just get warmer a tiny bit.

Batteries exist, and are getting better all the time.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com