A power plant for the Internet: our newest data center in Alabama | Hacker News Reader

A power plant for the Internet: our newest data center in Alabama

googleblog.blogspot.com

47 pointsuser_23571122 comments

>> Data centers need a lot of infrastructure to run 24/7, and there’s a lot of potential in redeveloping large industrial sites like former coal power plants.

I can see rust-belt cities like Detroit being prime for this kind of development. Real estate would be cheap or nearly free and local governments would love to get a big name like Google into a tax-free zone.

I live in Michigan and we do have a few datacenters and other Internet infrastructure organizations coming in, but I don't think the governments have realized the full potential yet, or the companies haven't gotten desperate enough. It's just not a big deal here.

Nearby, there is an old mine shaft that was repurposed into an underground datacenter, though. That was pretty cool.

The Tennessee Valley has a lot more "clean" power infrastructure than Detroit. Lake Guntersville is just over the hill from Huntsville and all the technology industry located there because of Redstone Arsenal and Marshall SFC.

Trouble is a dc doesn't employ that many people- especially with the way google have their dc's structured.

I bet you could run a google DC with 3 or 4 technical people per shift plus a few security guards plus their fury alligators (guards dogs)

Google stated that it would bring 75-100 permanent jobs.

Yes I am sure they did to the local politicians ;-)

Unless you collocating a call centre for adwords support I cant see how any DC would need 100 people full time - anyone got the org chart for a google DC?

There's just no way you can run a facility of that size with three people, sorry. In addition to DC techs you need building engineers, HVAC people, electricians, and probably a lot more that I'm not thinking of.

But post build and commissioning you don't need most of those full time. And given the way google run the dc the workload is a lot less than say an big IBM sysplex.

I bet you could run a Google style DC in normal ops with 3 or 4 people per shift plus security guards.

That's assuming they even bother with a 356/24h shift

You just fly in the specialized teams and new hardware already racked up when you need to.

especially as you have the link to the power grid already there I remember thinking the in the UK RAF twinwoods would have been a good place for a DC as it had a private link to the grid - as a result of all the Rnd and wind tunnels at that site.

"We’ve built our own super-efficient servers, invented more efficient ways to cool our data centers, and even used advanced machine learning to squeeze more out of every watt of power we consume. Compared to five years ago, we now get 3.5 times the computing power out of the same amount of energy."

I'm probably missing something, but isn't that just brought by the usual performance improvements between CPU generations?

> isn't that just brought by the usual performance improvements between CPU generations?

Not entirely. The quote is about computing power per unit of energy not per unit of time which is what Moore's Law is about.

Your Pentium probably ran at about 150 MHz and consumed around 12 Watts. A Core i7 might run at around 3 GHz, but it's also using 120 Watts to do it.

Take a look at the W/Ghz and W/Mhz columns in the charts here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_CPU_power_dissipation_...

Yes, the same chip can be used in more or less efficient ways. What they're describing includes:

- Turning off CPUs that aren't in use. Turning off machines that aren't in use, and moving jobs around to maximize that.

- Improving the air-conditioning efficiency. Typical data centers use more energy moving heat around than moving bits; Google has improved vastly on that.

- And more. Google has published papers on this stuff.

> I'm probably missing something, but isn't that just brought by the usual performance improvements between CPU generations?

Load balancing arbitrary computation is definitely a software problem as well as hardware. This is basically the halting problem on an industrial scale—you divvy up work without being able to understand it until it's done. At this scale, I'm also betting there is nearly infinite room to move computation around the data center and a lot of room to save money computing the same number of tasks on fewer cpus.

Google just published a great paper on that topic: http://highscalability.com/blog/2015/6/4/paper-heracles-impr...

There's more stuff to power in a data center than just CPUs. Not sure what the increase in performance per watt is in the CPUs Google used in 2010 compared to 2015, either.

Sitting in St. Louis, I'm about half way between the two, and I can feel the power, Captain!

“A power plant for the Internet”? That’s a bit presumptuous of Google, assigning themselves the position of powering the Internet. It’s like if China would call itself “creators of the computers for the Earth”. In both cases, the viewpoint has technical merit, but it’s a bad sign for the rest of us that they chose that particular way of putting it.

> Every time you check your Gmail, search on Google for a nearby restaurant, or watch a YouTube video, a server whirs to life in one of our data centers.

I see. Hmm, I don’t use Gmail or Google Search, but I do watch things on YouTube. I take this as a sign that I should stop. No real loss – I have other things to do with my time.

I suddenly realize what this reminds me of; it’s that quote from The Matrix:

“The Matrix is everywhere. It is all around us. Even now, in this very room. You can see it when you look out your window, or when you turn on your television. You can feel it when you go to work, when you go to church, when you pay your taxes.”

I guess the logical conclusion of your line of thinking is that you should stop using the Internet altogether, as there is no telling which sites are using google analytics or are hosted on the app engine, all of which will do the same thing

Please don’t be silly. Just because a person tries to cut down on salt doesn’t mean that the “logical conclusion” is that they should cut out salt completely, or indeed completely eschew all forms of spices or flavorings.

(Also, I block Google Analytics, and as I understand it, relatively few people use the Google app engine compared to other hosting solutions.)

Make sure and stay away from anyone who might be using Google's JS or font CDN's too.

I didn't realize how prevalent Google's JS and font CDNs were until I ran uMatrix for a while. It seems between GA, jQuery, and fonts, 80% of web sites I visit are tied into Google in some fashion.

That is not practical advice. Also, it is disingenous and belittling.

Please don’t belittle someone who just tries to avoid something which they percieve to be harmful in large doses. Do you similarly make fun of vegetarians with comments like “Make sure and stay away from red beets and blood oranges, haw haw!” or “But what if you swallowed a fly by accident? And what about the myriads of microorganisms that exist in everything?”

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