IMO, when your quality of life gets high enough, your lizard brain will find the most obscure problems to freak out about. From trying to avoid being eaten by lions to caring which continent the computers with electrons representing us digitally resides physically. What an amazing species we are.
Sadly, the question is "are they part of my tribe or not?"
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.
It would be interesting to compare big tech’s total carbon output to other major industries and find out. Also neat would be environmental impact per economic output.
> 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.
I think this speaks to the profound duplicity found inside humans. As if they just don't like the consequences of their actions waved in their face. In a lot of jurisdictions, data HAS to be stored locally, for privacy law reasons. So the data center has to go somewhere in the country, and the data center has to draw power from some local source. Given this reality, you just want the power to be clean. An analogy would be that "locals are appalled when they discover that eating meat requires killing animals". Given this reality, you just want the killing to be ethical. Maybe, like meat, put the data centers in some sparsely populated outskirts, out of sight and out of mind, and don't talk about it, sounds like that's what people really want here.
I'm not sure I understand the complaint - if power is going to be consumed regardless, what does it matter who/what consumes power from a particular source?
In many cases big tech companies are financing green electrical generation capacity. I don't know about this specific case, but in many cases the local green energy capacity is specifically built to power the data center.
My main complaint is that foreign big tech companies, or rather their shareholders, often exploit local resources like green energy, sparse living space, people’s privacy to generate large profits and take it home. Often avoiding responsibility by not paying taxes.
It’s business as usual, different industry, same shit.
Yeah, I think the best example is S3. Only when you have to hat much data with a Pareto access distribution can you do things like oversubscribe I/O a ton, or do clever encoding / compression schemes that wouldn’t make sense at the scales of an individual organization.
It really depends on what the capacity is being used for. From my experience, everything user facing (including all web serving, storage etc.) comprises a very tiny fraction of overall costs. The real $$$ (both input and output) is from big data/analytics/ML pipelines. Start a company that doesn't do any of that, and you'll have an infinitely better energy footprint.
That's not true. Storing data has costs. And not just hard drives. There are organizational risks in keeping data forever. Analytics could be needlessly complex with excessive data retention. Just store the data you need.
It’s likely we would need (much) more. If you look the efficiency of google and facebook they’re significantly better than many smaller organizations when it comes to utilization and PUE. Part of this is because they can afford to throw engineers at the problem, and a 1% savings in something like search easily makes up for an engineer’s salary. Depending on that 1% gain, it could also be applied to other BUs.
a bit of the current nuclear FUD - Lithuania considers giving out iodine to population to be prepared in case that new Belarusian nuclear power plant gets issues (https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-7383941/Lithuania-p...), and Armenia/Azerbaijan conflict this time seems to be going into full blown war, with things not going great for Armenia (Turkish drones have been proving themselves very effective there) which does have a nuclear power plant (giving the level of hate between Armenia and Turkey/Azerbaijan i'd not bet that, even if the direct war zone wouldn't reach the plant, the strategic chance to plunge your enemy's whole country into darkness would be passed by, especially if sabotage or strike can be made to look like an accident) .
As a Lithuanian I can tell that a lot of what Lithuania does with regards to the nuclear plant in Belarus is just fearmongering. The most active critics come from political parties which don't want that plant due to political reasons. Having a nearby nuclear plant effectively controlled by an ally of Putin is not a good thing and I agree with that, but this has nothing to do with safety. It's all political play.
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.
I myself originally from Russia from around those places and have family in Ukraine, Russia, Belarus and Lithuania.
>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.
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.
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.
I hope civilization lasts to 2030. It is possible.
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.
I read this via Google's cache, ironically. The words "Facebook" and "Google" appear only in the title. AFAIK neither has any presence in Sweden. So, clickbait, essentially.
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.
Facebook do have presence in Sweden, in Luleå. Amazon also have precence. Microsoft have bought some areal in Sweden. Google, however does not have any data centers (to my knowledge) here but they do have in Finland (one of our neighbouring countries).
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?
Some teams may use it at the big companies and I myself have used lesser performant languages at some of the big companies but only for smaller stuff. For the widely used stuff which big companies do a lot of, you need high efficiency and javascript ain't gonna do 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.
Why would peer to peer be greener? Forget studies, peer to peer doesn't mean less less bits on the wire, and doesn't mean less CPU cycles to process those bits.
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.
I’m not sure that it’s just that. In some ways, you have force multipliers that have multiple order effects. I’ll give two examples.
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.
Ah nice coincidence. I was trying to estimate how much power was wasted in our compute grid due to poor memory allocation from linux malloc() and came around 1-2% of a nuclear power plant.
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.
Anything I can read up on why fragmentation is so expensive? My naive brain keeps saying "why not use a hash map of lists, by size" but I know I'm missing something.
I'm not sure what a "server hall" specifically is. Is that referring to a single data-center or a whole set of data-centers (limited to a geographic area perhaps)? There is some interesting ideas here but with my limited domain experience I can't really make much sense of what's going on other than simply that we spend a lot of power on servers.
The debate and outrage have been about whether this is a good deal for Sweden or not.
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.
At least in the states, most power companies require a commitment when you are using more than a megawatt of power. The idea is that you use this money to build infrastructure to support the customer (high power distribution usually). I’m surprised they wouldn’t build storage capacity as part of that which can then be used all over the entire grid.
This piece has been automatically translated and the original source is a right wing news outlet called "Fria Tider".
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.
72 comments
[ 11.3 ms ] story [ 144 ms ] threadCan’t help but think big tech is becoming a burden on society and the environment.
The proposal I replied to would probably increase data center energy usage on balance.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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."
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
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?
https://jaxenter.com/energy-efficient-programming-languages-...
https://stefanos1316.github.io/my_curriculum_vitae/GKS17.pdf
https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-01496266/document
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.
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.
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.
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.
https://archive.is/1ND9U
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.
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.