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DeepMind claims that AlphaGo has already paid for itself when it was used to cut Google’s data center cooling costs, so it is not infeasible there may be many o

DeepMind claims that AlphaGo has already paid for itself when it was used to cut Google’s data center cooling costs, so it is not infeasible there may be many other domains which may benefit.

skybrian 9y ago
Where did you read that? Are you sure they weren't talking about machine learning in general?
- gwern 9y ago
  It has been cited in a number articles quoting Demis Hassabis; Hassabis repeated the claim in his recent talk on AG (specifically, that deep RL related to AlphaGo has reduced Google datacenter cooling costs by 40% and is saving Google hundreds of millions of dollars a year) and added in the additional interesting detail that Google has changed its datacenter design plans to add in additional sensors & controls for the deep RL agents. They haven't gone into detail as to how exactly this is done, but my guess is that they use their historical data series on cooling/electricity consumption to bootstrap and then it learns online normally with policy gradients (since cooling and temperature control seem like something with continuous actions rather than a few discrete ones, so an actor-critic rather than DQN).
  - dontreact 9y ago
    If you look more closely at the details here (beyond just deepminds blog post) you'll see that 1. It has not yet been deployed to all data centers. They just turned the system off for a period of time and looked at how much extra money it cost to run the data center like that, then extrapolated. 2. There was already a Google engineer back in 2012 who applied neural networks to this problem and saw huge gains (There is a blog post about this somewhere). In the deepmind blog post, they don't compare to this system, do for all we know it could just be a small refinement of that system. It is actually not clear whether deep RL was actually used or not from the deepminds blog post: it is only kind of implied.
    - gwern 9y ago
      > If you look more closely at the details here (beyond just deepminds blog post) Where would that be? As far as I know, the DM blog post and Hassabis's occasional discussions are the most detailed public information available. And they don't mention that it's just a brief demo. > 2. There was already a Google engineer back in 2012 who applied neural networks to this problem and saw huge gains (There is a blog post about this somewhere) I don't remember this.
      - dontreact 9y ago
        https://googleblog.blogspot.com/2014/05/better-data-centers-through-machine.html?m=1 https://googleblog.blogspot.com/2014/05/better-data-centers-...
        dontreact 9y ago
        Misremembered the year. Actually 2014
        gwern 9y ago
        So, that was 2 years deeper into the deep learning revolution, post-DeepMind acquisition, doesn't actually say it was a NN (the diagram could be literally any ML model from linear model to random forest), doesn't say they reduced costs by anything approaching 40%, or even are using it in production at all aside from the one instance they patched around some downtime.
        FreakLegion 9y ago
        "Today we’re releasing a white paper (PDF) on how we’re using neural networks to optimize data center operations and drive our energy use to new lows."
        gwern 9y ago
        Ah, missed that. In any case, the paper confirms what I said: they haven't used it in practice, and the only time they have was the brief one mentioned in the post where it resulted in a small PUE saving (it quotes 0.02, off an unspecified reduced load but note for comparison the average PUE of ~1.12, so saving anything remotely like 40% is unlikely).
  - skybrian 9y ago
    I can believe "deep RL related to AlphaGo" but that was somehow transmuted to "[AlphaGo] was used to cut Google’s data center cooling costs", which doesn't make sense. (Just nitpicking here.)
    - throwaway010317 9y ago
      FYI I heard this first had from a DeepMind employee.

DeepMind claims that AlphaGo has already paid for itself when it was used to cut Google’s data center cooling costs, so it is not infeasible there may be many other domains which may benefit.

skybrian 9y ago

Where did you read that? Are you sure they weren't talking about machine learning in general?

gwern 9y ago
It has been cited in a number articles quoting Demis Hassabis; Hassabis repeated the claim in his recent talk on AG (specifically, that deep RL related to AlphaGo has reduced Google datacenter cooling costs by 40% and is saving Google hundreds of millions of dollars a year) and added in the additional interesting detail that Google has changed its datacenter design plans to add in additional sensors & controls for the deep RL agents. They haven't gone into detail as to how exactly this is done, but my guess is that they use their historical data series on cooling/electricity consumption to bootstrap and then it learns online normally with policy gradients (since cooling and temperature control seem like something with continuous actions rather than a few discrete ones, so an actor-critic rather than DQN).
- dontreact 9y ago
  If you look more closely at the details here (beyond just deepminds blog post) you'll see that 1. It has not yet been deployed to all data centers. They just turned the system off for a period of time and looked at how much extra money it cost to run the data center like that, then extrapolated. 2. There was already a Google engineer back in 2012 who applied neural networks to this problem and saw huge gains (There is a blog post about this somewhere). In the deepmind blog post, they don't compare to this system, do for all we know it could just be a small refinement of that system. It is actually not clear whether deep RL was actually used or not from the deepminds blog post: it is only kind of implied.
  - gwern 9y ago
    > If you look more closely at the details here (beyond just deepminds blog post) Where would that be? As far as I know, the DM blog post and Hassabis's occasional discussions are the most detailed public information available. And they don't mention that it's just a brief demo. > 2. There was already a Google engineer back in 2012 who applied neural networks to this problem and saw huge gains (There is a blog post about this somewhere) I don't remember this.
    - dontreact 9y ago
      https://googleblog.blogspot.com/2014/05/better-data-centers-through-machine.html?m=1 https://googleblog.blogspot.com/2014/05/better-data-centers-...
      - dontreact 9y ago
        Misremembered the year. Actually 2014
      - gwern 9y ago
        So, that was 2 years deeper into the deep learning revolution, post-DeepMind acquisition, doesn't actually say it was a NN (the diagram could be literally any ML model from linear model to random forest), doesn't say they reduced costs by anything approaching 40%, or even are using it in production at all aside from the one instance they patched around some downtime.
        FreakLegion 9y ago
        "Today we’re releasing a white paper (PDF) on how we’re using neural networks to optimize data center operations and drive our energy use to new lows."
        gwern 9y ago
        Ah, missed that. In any case, the paper confirms what I said: they haven't used it in practice, and the only time they have was the brief one mentioned in the post where it resulted in a small PUE saving (it quotes 0.02, off an unspecified reduced load but note for comparison the average PUE of ~1.12, so saving anything remotely like 40% is unlikely).
- skybrian 9y ago
  I can believe "deep RL related to AlphaGo" but that was somehow transmuted to "[AlphaGo] was used to cut Google’s data center cooling costs", which doesn't make sense. (Just nitpicking here.)
  - throwaway010317 9y ago
    FYI I heard this first had from a DeepMind employee.