On 9/24/12 4:38 PM, Toth, Csaba wrote:
This little bit comes to the topic:
"Apple's Huge New Data Center In North Carolina Created Only 50 Jobs"
http://articles.businessinsider.com/2011-11-28/news/30446402_1_apple-iphone-apps-facebook-and-other-companies
I liked that talk a lot, and I also hope, that when machines will do a lot of
work instead of people, we'll be able to focus on other work to be done. And
there's a lot, just as the talk mentioned (hunger, etc).
But the jobs what robots will do will be first those jobs which doesn't require
education. I have a fear that all of the people without education won't be able to
fulfill a "higher level" job! (Not even mentioning that machines will be able
to do even very complex jobs thanks to advances in AI).
This connects, but off-topic. But I'm very curious about your opinion, my wife
showed this article to me yesterday:
https://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/23/technology/data-centers-waste-vast-amounts-of-energy-belying-industry-image.html?pagewanted=all&_moc.semityn.www
I tried to describe it to her that despite of all of the irregularities (like the lack of permit for the diesel generator of the cited Amazon datacenter) datacenters to my knowledge consolidate processing power usage. So without datacenters -> if every company would have their own tiny server room, it'd be way more inefficient in the end. For example the datacenter can have one huge very efficient AC as opposed to a small server room's. (Not to even mentioning that some companies like Amazon and Microsoft are experimenting with AC-less designs.) I also don't understand where those data come from about inefficiency in the article. Because the datacenter has to pay the electricity bill, in theory it's interest to be as efficient as possible. The last 5-10-15 year's hardware have incorporated power saving technologies in the CPU and chipset level, so you don't even need to configure anything, and if the machine is not loaded, it simply won't consume as much energy (CPU and memory will
go to a lower power state automatically), ideally it'll sleep. But you can even
write management software to control racks, I'm sure modern datacenters have
that. My wife argues that the people cited in the article probably (?)
creditable and from all around this industry, but the whole big picture drawn
by the article is weird for me. They talk about some underlying deep secret.
What is that?
Surely datacenters can occupy a complete line of a powerplant, but they are the
most efficient alternatives because of consolidation. As far as I know. Correct
me if I'm wrong.
I know that every google search has a carbon footprint. If the article finds
that the consumed power is a lot (indeed), then it's not the fault of the
datacenters, but it's the hunger and the demand for processing power from _us_,
people. Surely the efficiency of both the hardware and the software can be
increased, and it'll be done actually, because the electricity bill is there,
the power is not for free, and it should be spared. So I feel safe that
efficiency will be even higher.
The article upset me a little, because I couldn't argue well being a "john Doe" on the
datacenter field as opposed to "big names" (???) in the article. But I have my gut
feelings.
Also, it's a little funny about the diesel generator: I agree that
environmental standards should be obeyed, but when the Amazon's datacenter went
down in Virginia, then Instagram and other services went down and people were
pointing with finger at the cloud as a technology. Well, if we want 24/7
reliability, then a diesel generator is needed. Actually more of them (more
levels of protection!) for a huge datacenter.
Maybe the datacenters surveyed by the article (producing whopping low
efficiency) are old datacenters? But at the same time they talk about Amazon,
Yahoo, etc. I have a feeling that the journalist wanted a blasting article. Is
it only exaggeration? Or it's totally misleading?
So please hit me with your opinion. I'm happy to see that Paul Weiss is here
too, he also must have experiences with!
Csaba
________________________________________
Or, we could write more efficient code, which uses less server
resources. I don't recall anyone writing web code in assembly, though.
--
Drew from Zhrodague
lolcat divinator
[email protected]
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