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Energy infrastructure

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    #5492
    gjim
    Registered Users Posts: 1,179 ✭✭✭gjim


    I don't see it as a massive problem. Or at least I don't see a need for any hysteria.

    Given that most of the capacity being added is renewable, an overall expansion of consumption and production of electricity will result in smaller and smaller share for fossil.

    Datacentres are just doing the work that would otherwise be distributed across consumer devices except there's efficiency in doing the work at this sort of scale. If we don't want to curtail access to the benefits of modern technology, then it's best the heavy lifting is done in data-centres rather than on everyones' phone/laptop or whatever.



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    #5493
    KrisW1001
    Registered Users Posts: 1,596 ✭✭✭KrisW1001


    https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/122430822#Comment_122430822

    Every job "offloaded" to a datacentre incurs a pretty heavy overhead. It makes sense to do this only when the DC alone has the means needed to perform the operation (e.g. web search and other heavy computation with large datasets), but I've seen local client applications offload trivial calculations to "the backend" for the sole reason that it's less hassle than doing it locally.

    As an industry, Web-based services have as much interest in energy efficiency as the US car industry did in the 1960s when petrol was ten cents a gallon…



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    #5494
    Shoog
    Registered Users Posts: 5,289 ✭✭✭Shoog


    Loading ourselves with data centres makes our chance of hitting our carbon reduction targets ever more difficult. We should only be building data centres to soak up excess capacity - not running to keep up with an ever expanding demand. There are already places such as Norway which can meet this criteria.

    It's a crazy policy.



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    #5495
    gjim
    Registered Users Posts: 1,179 ✭✭✭gjim


    https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/122431597#Comment_122431597


    Come on, very little energy required to send data - compute at both ends dominates the energy consumption.

    Moving servers and services out of DCs and into on-prem racks is not going to reduce the aggregate consumed energy - it will increase it as well as hugely increase the amount of electronic waste. Just because it's easier to measure DC energy consumption and difficult to measure aggregate "local" compute energy consumption doesn't mean you can discount the latter.

    Whether modern software is bloated and inefficient is a separate issue and affects all software regardless of the topology/architecture.

    Yes, youtube is wasteful of energy, as is computer gaming, running TV stations, hosting big sports events, eating out in restaurants, travelling anywhere, etc. But which of these "wasteful activities" are justified and which are not, again is not an argument that has anything to do whether we'd be better off in term so aggregate energy consumption if we moved more to on-prem from DC .



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    #5496
    gjim
    Registered Users Posts: 1,179 ✭✭✭gjim


    https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/122431663#Comment_122431663

    At the end of the day, warming is a global issue. There's no harm in using local or country based metrics for setting goals/targets and tracking progress but the most important thing for me is the global/aggregate metric. If 100 arbitrary countries blow through their targets while at the global level we manage to cut emissions sufficiently to avoid climate disaster, then I'm fine with it. Of course to do this, individual countries should set goals and track their progress.



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    #5497
    KrisW1001
    Registered Users Posts: 1,596 ✭✭✭KrisW1001


    https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/122431798#Comment_122431798

    "Very little energy". Do you know how much, or are you assuming that it's not much because "everyone does it"?

    Do you imagine that a datacentre CPU is more energy efficient than the one in your mobile phone? And that's before considering the transmission costs inside and outside the DC.

    YouTube isn't actaully that big an energy user per client: it pulls data from a filestore and copies it into a transmission buffer: there's very little computation needed, and this can be (and is) done in hardware to save even more energy. The big hogs are the medium-usage services behind your mobile apps that aren't big enough that optimisation would be commercially beneficial, but are still big enough that their inefficiency is significant.

    However, the energy efficiency of software, while of nterest to me, is off topic in this thread, so I'll leave my comments at this, except to say that because DCs are such a big part of our energy consumption, the inefficiency of that software does have an impact on our environmental targets, and it's one over which we have little control.



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    #5498
    gjim
    Registered Users Posts: 1,179 ✭✭✭gjim


    Do you know how much, or are you assuming that it's not much because "everyone does it"?

    I don't get the "everyone does it" bit? I know that the energy cost to move data over fibre is a fraction of that to move it over wired ethernet which in turn it a tiny fraction of the energy cost to move the data around a computer bus which in turn is a fraction of the energy cost to move the data through a CPU. Transmission costs are effectively nothing - 99%+ of the energy consumed by DC is consumed on the motherboard either directly or in trying to remove the heat from it.

    I don't even have to do the calculations - just touch an ethernet cable. Is it even warm even when carrying data at max capacity? No. Now try touching a busy CPU (actually don't or wear gloves) - it's hot, RAM is warm as are motherboards. The energy consumed becomes heat.

    Do you imagine that a datacentre CPU is more energy efficient than the one in your mobile phone?

    Of course it is! Energy is possibly the biggest ongoing cost for running a DC, if operators could achieve the same computation using mobile phones, DC's would be filled with them.



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    #5499
    BKtje
    Registered Users Posts: 8,049 ✭✭✭BKtje


    I don't know how much energy is required to send a packet but it's not what's flowing through the cables which use the most energy. It's the routers switches gateways and firewalls which consume a tonne. Touch them and you'll find that they are very much hot and are critical in sending data. Also the surface area of a cpu is much lower than that of a cable so even if both had the same power running through them the temperature would not be the same.

    That said I have no problem with data centers. They pay for the power they use so are paying for the expansion of the network. As long as they don't cause Brown outs or black outs of course.



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    #5500
    Apogee
    Registered Users Posts: 3,797 ✭✭✭Apogee


    These numbers from 2022 compare the %share that data centres consume across EU countries - Ireland a clear outlier

    image.png

    Source: https://publications.jrc.ec.europa.eu/repository/handle/JRC135926



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