8 ms·

This is really impactful work. Data centers are 2% of US electricity consumption, and a 20% improvement in idle energy usage will cut that by a sizable fractio

This is really impactful work. Data centers are 2% of US electricity consumption, and a 20% improvement in idle energy usage will cut that by a sizable fraction. (Even if virtualization is intended to reduce idle hardware capacity.)

deepsun 8y ago
Well, if your goal is to reduce electricity consumption, the proper way would be to increase prices for it. It's just there might be easier and faster ways, not only improving idle CPU states.
- laumars 8y ago
  I hate that approach so much. By increasing prices you're not reducing demand, you're just making it less affordable for people who might need it equally than those who are in better paid jobs etc. I prefer the approach of improving energy efficiency (short to mid term time scale) and investing in greener energy sources (mid to long term) to bide us time until nuclear fusion becomes viable and thus electricity consumption no longer becomes a harmful process. We shouldn't punish people less fortunate than ourselves for our own gluttony - which is all that raising prices would do.
  - blihp 8y ago
    But raising prices on electricity would spur demand for improved energy efficiency. Consumers are notoriously short-sighted on things that don't impact them directly and immediately. We Americans used to love our V8 engines in our big, boaty cars. Then we had an energy crisis and gas prices rocketed up. For a while, people bought more fuel efficient small cars with 6- or 4-cylinder engines. Then gas prices dropped and people started buying trucks. Then gas prices went up again and small cars became popular again. Then gas prices dropped and people started buying SUVs/crossovers... see a pattern forming?
    - mav3rick 8y ago
      While the market kicks into gear many people may lose lives or their livelihood. Capitalism doesn't work instantly.
      - blihp 8y ago
        You're absolutely right and it does take time. Unfortunately, when dealing with macro-level issues like this, putting in place long-term incentives and disincentives in the form of fines/taxes/etc. has been shown to work far better than just encouraging people to 'do the right thing.'
      - adrianN 8y ago
        You can increase prices slowly, or announce that you will increases prices in fife years. I find it quite unlikely that people's life will collapse when you increase energy prices by five percent a year or so.
        mav3rick 8y ago
        Please try and live in a developing country. 5% is huge for a family that can't make ends meet. I don't want to generalize but utopian ideas seem to be propped up on HN without counting billions of other people and their circumstances.
        adrianN 8y ago
        Luckily we can get 80% of the way to our carbon goals by completely ignoring developing countries and fixing things in the rich countries.
      - peteretep 8y ago
        Historically, many more seem to lose their lives in directed economies.
        TeMPOraL 8y ago
  - ben_bai 8y ago
    Except raising prices is the only thing that has the desired outcome. If PCs use only half the wattage that they used to consume... great now I can afford to run 2 for the same price.
    - deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
    - laumars 8y ago
      I cannot see that happening on the consumer side of things because consumers have generally* not looked at power consumption as a factor for which hardware to buy nor how many to run. * "generally" because home servers / media centres / etc are often picked for their power consumption. As are mining servers (eg crypto-currency). But these are by far the exception rather than the norm in terms of consumer devices.
    - PeterisP 8y ago
      It only matters if energy consumption is large compared to cost of the device or otherwise total cost of ownership. If PCs use only half the wattage that they used to consume, then it doesn't meaningfully change how many computers (or how powerful single computer) I can afford, because paying for the computers themselves dwarfs the payment for running them.
  - fnord123 8y ago
    >I prefer the approach of improving energy efficiency (short to mid term time scale) and investing in greener energy sources (mid to long term) to bide us time until nuclear fusion becomes viable and thus electricity consumption no longer becomes a harmful process. Raising efficiency probably won't help at all due to Jevon's paradox: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox """ In economics, the Jevons paradox (/ˈdʒɛvənz/; sometimes Jevons effect) occurs when technological progress increases the efficiency with which a resource is used (reducing the amount necessary for any one use), but the rate of consumption of that resource rises due to increasing demand.[1] The Jevons paradox is perhaps the most widely known paradox in environmental economics.[2] However, governments and environmentalists generally assume that efficiency gains will lower resource consumption, ignoring the possibility of the paradox arising.[3] In 1865, the English economist William Stanley Jevons observed that technological improvements that increased the efficiency of coal-use led to the increased consumption of coal in a wide range of industries. He argued that, contrary to common intuition, technological progress could not be relied upon to reduce fuel consumption. """
    - laumars 8y ago
      I quite believe that phenomena is true for industry but I would be surprised if it still applied to electricity consumption in consumer devices. The cost of power there is pretty low in real terms (low enough that few consumers will factor the cost of running a device into account for general* computing devices or other household goods) but the collective savings from energy efficient hardware at a national scale is massive. So I couldn't see people buying a second mobile phone or laptop just because it's more energy efficient). The question of datacentres is another matter though. But they only respond to demand from people like ourselves who lease computing time from them / place our own hardware in their racks. * I'm not counting mining (bitcoin et al), home servers, media centres, etc. where it's more likely running costs will be factored into the buying decision. However these are uncommon compared to other hardware like laptops, desktop PCs, games consoles, mobile phones, TVs, fridges, kettles, etc.
      - Sharlin 8y ago
  - gambiting 8y ago
    That's the same argument against making petrol more expensive - because there are people who need it so making it more expensive is somehow unfair to them. Absolutely disagree here - if petrol was vastly more expensive, alternative technologies would have to come down in price and be more popular, so yes, even the poorer people could eventually afford them. By keeping the price as low as it is(and living in the UK it's hugely expensive compared to US and many EU countries) we're allowing huge pollution of the environment for the sake of affordability. Maybe by that logic we should allow coal-fired boilers again? They are still allowed in many places across the EU for that exact reason - because forcing people to switch to natural gas/electricity/ecopellets would punish the less fortunate people. But the "less fortunate" people are going to be fucked the most if we don't work on the pollution, which is sort of impossible if we're stopping the fight because of them in the first place.
    - laumars 8y ago
      That's not really an equivalent example because there isn't an alternative to electricity where as there is an alternative to driving petrol powered vehicles (electric vehicles, public transport, car share, bicycle, walk, etc). I also don't appreciate your "Maybe by that logic we should allow coal-fired boilers again?" comment when I was very clear in my post - the one you're directly replying to - that we should be focusing on greener forms of electricity creation and energy consumption. If that does also drive up electricity prices then so be it. However artificially increasing electricity prices and expecting the market to do the honourable thing seems like you're trying to solve the problem by changing the end variable rather than fixing the root cause itself and letting market prices adjust accordingly.
  - gmac 8y ago
    Yes and no. Policymakers too rarely do anything to show they care about distributional impacts, but you could certainly arrange things so as to fix this. Why not impose a tax that doubles the cost of energy, and use all of the proceeds to fund universal basic income? That would both help poorer people and reduce energy usage.
  - pjc50 8y ago
    Well, the same is true of every price level change, especially in food and housing. I'm sympathetic to the "fuel poverty" arguments, but fuel and energy subsidies are a pretty bad way of addressing the problem. Especially in non-Western countries.
  - abecedarius 8y ago
    Generally it’s more efficient to help the poor by giving them money, not by distorting prices. Prices are information guiding a giant distributed system; you don’t lie to your OS kernel and expect your programs to run as well. Making energy prices include externalities would encourage the improvements you listed.
  - okreallywtf 8y ago
    Maybe we need progressive pricing?
    - ohithereyou 8y ago
      Progressive pricing of goods/commodities tied to CO2 emissions as a result of their production/consumption would be good. Transportation, energy, industry, and agriculture account for the majority of US greenhouse gas emission. Charging heavy consumers at a progressively higher rate will ensure the heaviest emitters pay their share without disproportionally affecting low income or light emitters.
    - TheDong 8y ago
      Unfortunately that's no longer possible in the united states due to citizens united.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- crististm 8y ago
  Energy demand is not elastic so raising prices is not the right way to reduce demand. Raising prices for inelastic commodities does not change the behavior of the consumer.
  - mixmastamyk 8y ago
    Why do you think it is not elastic?
    - crististm 8y ago
      Because it is a basic need of today's society. You can't suddenly decide you won't use energy without significant side-effects. It's worse if someone else decides that for you by raising prices.
      - mixmastamyk 8y ago
        Dunno, you can go without, shift timing, or buy more efficient devices.
- lathiat 8y ago
  Your argument makes no sense because it is self defeating. The point of increasing the price of electricity is to increase the incentive to use less of it. How would we use less of it? Precisely by actions such as development time spent on tasks to reduce energy usage.. such as improving the CPU idle states (among many, many other such options).
  - Double_a_92 8y ago
    The increased cost makes it more impactful for the companies, even if they don't care about the enviroment. So they actually might pay the engineers to do something about it.
    - foobarchu 8y ago
      What i'm getting here is that you think the author should stop working on this research, because if he doesn't then maybe companies will start funding him so he can...do this exact research? Science shouldn't grind to a halt just because not doing it might increase funding.
      - Double_a_92 8y ago
        No, more of the opposite. Companies should support him and others researchers because it's in their own interest.
  - maxlybbert 8y ago
    I don’t see how that’s self defeating. But I understood the comment to be “if electricity cost more, people and companies would be more diligent in turning off lights when they aren’t needed, setting the thermostat to use less electricity, and doing other simple things to save electricity and money.” It wasn’t a question of whether the kernel can do a good job automatically, but whether there is low hanging fruit that we’re currently ignoring.
- MaxBarraclough 8y ago
  I don't want to sound complacent, but I don't see that 2% is necessarily a bad sign. I suspect that 2% of the power-consumption is integral to well over 2% of the economy, for instance. Improving energy efficiency is always good, of course, but I'm not convinced there's a whole lot of low-hanging fruit that people need to be economically incentivised to implement. That said, there are projects like Erlang on Xen [0] (a bare-metal-ish system) which enable unusual deployment patterns like spinning up a VM only after a request has been received, which could, presumably, make radically more efficient use of virtualised platforms. Not sure if anyone's done this in anger though. Edit: I suppose higher prices would lead more people to do simple things like configuring their test servers to shutdown overnight and on weekends, mind [0] http://erlangonxen.org/ http://erlangonxen.org/ , also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5431392 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5431392
- Twirrim 8y ago
  How do you envision that actually helping in this case?
- rmdashrfroot 8y ago
  You sound like a California politician
diffeomorphism 8y ago
Naive question here, but how much of the time would you expect cpus in a data center to idle? Also, you save 20% of idle (which is a sizable percentage, but not much in absolute wattage) and nothing when not idle (which is much higher wattage). So how much do you save per month overall?1%, 0.1%?

deepsun 8y ago

Well, if your goal is to reduce electricity consumption, the proper way would be to increase prices for it. It's just there might be easier and faster ways, not only improving idle CPU states.

laumars 8y ago
I hate that approach so much. By increasing prices you're not reducing demand, you're just making it less affordable for people who might need it equally than those who are in better paid jobs etc. I prefer the approach of improving energy efficiency (short to mid term time scale) and investing in greener energy sources (mid to long term) to bide us time until nuclear fusion becomes viable and thus electricity consumption no longer becomes a harmful process. We shouldn't punish people less fortunate than ourselves for our own gluttony - which is all that raising prices would do.
- blihp 8y ago
  But raising prices on electricity would spur demand for improved energy efficiency. Consumers are notoriously short-sighted on things that don't impact them directly and immediately. We Americans used to love our V8 engines in our big, boaty cars. Then we had an energy crisis and gas prices rocketed up. For a while, people bought more fuel efficient small cars with 6- or 4-cylinder engines. Then gas prices dropped and people started buying trucks. Then gas prices went up again and small cars became popular again. Then gas prices dropped and people started buying SUVs/crossovers... see a pattern forming?
  - mav3rick 8y ago
    While the market kicks into gear many people may lose lives or their livelihood. Capitalism doesn't work instantly.
    - blihp 8y ago
      You're absolutely right and it does take time. Unfortunately, when dealing with macro-level issues like this, putting in place long-term incentives and disincentives in the form of fines/taxes/etc. has been shown to work far better than just encouraging people to 'do the right thing.'
    - adrianN 8y ago
      You can increase prices slowly, or announce that you will increases prices in fife years. I find it quite unlikely that people's life will collapse when you increase energy prices by five percent a year or so.
      - mav3rick 8y ago
        Please try and live in a developing country. 5% is huge for a family that can't make ends meet. I don't want to generalize but utopian ideas seem to be propped up on HN without counting billions of other people and their circumstances.
        adrianN 8y ago
        Luckily we can get 80% of the way to our carbon goals by completely ignoring developing countries and fixing things in the rich countries.
    - peteretep 8y ago
      Historically, many more seem to lose their lives in directed economies.
      - TeMPOraL 8y ago
- ben_bai 8y ago
  Except raising prices is the only thing that has the desired outcome. If PCs use only half the wattage that they used to consume... great now I can afford to run 2 for the same price.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - laumars 8y ago
    I cannot see that happening on the consumer side of things because consumers have generally* not looked at power consumption as a factor for which hardware to buy nor how many to run. * "generally" because home servers / media centres / etc are often picked for their power consumption. As are mining servers (eg crypto-currency). But these are by far the exception rather than the norm in terms of consumer devices.
  - PeterisP 8y ago
    It only matters if energy consumption is large compared to cost of the device or otherwise total cost of ownership. If PCs use only half the wattage that they used to consume, then it doesn't meaningfully change how many computers (or how powerful single computer) I can afford, because paying for the computers themselves dwarfs the payment for running them.
- fnord123 8y ago
  >I prefer the approach of improving energy efficiency (short to mid term time scale) and investing in greener energy sources (mid to long term) to bide us time until nuclear fusion becomes viable and thus electricity consumption no longer becomes a harmful process. Raising efficiency probably won't help at all due to Jevon's paradox: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox """ In economics, the Jevons paradox (/ˈdʒɛvənz/; sometimes Jevons effect) occurs when technological progress increases the efficiency with which a resource is used (reducing the amount necessary for any one use), but the rate of consumption of that resource rises due to increasing demand.[1] The Jevons paradox is perhaps the most widely known paradox in environmental economics.[2] However, governments and environmentalists generally assume that efficiency gains will lower resource consumption, ignoring the possibility of the paradox arising.[3] In 1865, the English economist William Stanley Jevons observed that technological improvements that increased the efficiency of coal-use led to the increased consumption of coal in a wide range of industries. He argued that, contrary to common intuition, technological progress could not be relied upon to reduce fuel consumption. """
  - laumars 8y ago
    I quite believe that phenomena is true for industry but I would be surprised if it still applied to electricity consumption in consumer devices. The cost of power there is pretty low in real terms (low enough that few consumers will factor the cost of running a device into account for general* computing devices or other household goods) but the collective savings from energy efficient hardware at a national scale is massive. So I couldn't see people buying a second mobile phone or laptop just because it's more energy efficient). The question of datacentres is another matter though. But they only respond to demand from people like ourselves who lease computing time from them / place our own hardware in their racks. * I'm not counting mining (bitcoin et al), home servers, media centres, etc. where it's more likely running costs will be factored into the buying decision. However these are uncommon compared to other hardware like laptops, desktop PCs, games consoles, mobile phones, TVs, fridges, kettles, etc.
    - Sharlin 8y ago
- gambiting 8y ago
  That's the same argument against making petrol more expensive - because there are people who need it so making it more expensive is somehow unfair to them. Absolutely disagree here - if petrol was vastly more expensive, alternative technologies would have to come down in price and be more popular, so yes, even the poorer people could eventually afford them. By keeping the price as low as it is(and living in the UK it's hugely expensive compared to US and many EU countries) we're allowing huge pollution of the environment for the sake of affordability. Maybe by that logic we should allow coal-fired boilers again? They are still allowed in many places across the EU for that exact reason - because forcing people to switch to natural gas/electricity/ecopellets would punish the less fortunate people. But the "less fortunate" people are going to be fucked the most if we don't work on the pollution, which is sort of impossible if we're stopping the fight because of them in the first place.
  - laumars 8y ago
    That's not really an equivalent example because there isn't an alternative to electricity where as there is an alternative to driving petrol powered vehicles (electric vehicles, public transport, car share, bicycle, walk, etc). I also don't appreciate your "Maybe by that logic we should allow coal-fired boilers again?" comment when I was very clear in my post - the one you're directly replying to - that we should be focusing on greener forms of electricity creation and energy consumption. If that does also drive up electricity prices then so be it. However artificially increasing electricity prices and expecting the market to do the honourable thing seems like you're trying to solve the problem by changing the end variable rather than fixing the root cause itself and letting market prices adjust accordingly.
- gmac 8y ago
  Yes and no. Policymakers too rarely do anything to show they care about distributional impacts, but you could certainly arrange things so as to fix this. Why not impose a tax that doubles the cost of energy, and use all of the proceeds to fund universal basic income? That would both help poorer people and reduce energy usage.
- pjc50 8y ago
  Well, the same is true of every price level change, especially in food and housing. I'm sympathetic to the "fuel poverty" arguments, but fuel and energy subsidies are a pretty bad way of addressing the problem. Especially in non-Western countries.
- abecedarius 8y ago
  Generally it’s more efficient to help the poor by giving them money, not by distorting prices. Prices are information guiding a giant distributed system; you don’t lie to your OS kernel and expect your programs to run as well. Making energy prices include externalities would encourage the improvements you listed.
- okreallywtf 8y ago
  Maybe we need progressive pricing?
  - ohithereyou 8y ago
    Progressive pricing of goods/commodities tied to CO2 emissions as a result of their production/consumption would be good. Transportation, energy, industry, and agriculture account for the majority of US greenhouse gas emission. Charging heavy consumers at a progressively higher rate will ensure the heaviest emitters pay their share without disproportionally affecting low income or light emitters.
  - TheDong 8y ago
    Unfortunately that's no longer possible in the united states due to citizens united.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
crististm 8y ago
Energy demand is not elastic so raising prices is not the right way to reduce demand. Raising prices for inelastic commodities does not change the behavior of the consumer.
- mixmastamyk 8y ago
  Why do you think it is not elastic?
  - crististm 8y ago
    Because it is a basic need of today's society. You can't suddenly decide you won't use energy without significant side-effects. It's worse if someone else decides that for you by raising prices.
    - mixmastamyk 8y ago
      Dunno, you can go without, shift timing, or buy more efficient devices.
lathiat 8y ago
Your argument makes no sense because it is self defeating. The point of increasing the price of electricity is to increase the incentive to use less of it. How would we use less of it? Precisely by actions such as development time spent on tasks to reduce energy usage.. such as improving the CPU idle states (among many, many other such options).
- Double_a_92 8y ago
  The increased cost makes it more impactful for the companies, even if they don't care about the enviroment. So they actually might pay the engineers to do something about it.
  - foobarchu 8y ago
    What i'm getting here is that you think the author should stop working on this research, because if he doesn't then maybe companies will start funding him so he can...do this exact research? Science shouldn't grind to a halt just because not doing it might increase funding.
    - Double_a_92 8y ago
      No, more of the opposite. Companies should support him and others researchers because it's in their own interest.
- maxlybbert 8y ago
  I don’t see how that’s self defeating. But I understood the comment to be “if electricity cost more, people and companies would be more diligent in turning off lights when they aren’t needed, setting the thermostat to use less electricity, and doing other simple things to save electricity and money.” It wasn’t a question of whether the kernel can do a good job automatically, but whether there is low hanging fruit that we’re currently ignoring.
MaxBarraclough 8y ago
I don't want to sound complacent, but I don't see that 2% is necessarily a bad sign. I suspect that 2% of the power-consumption is integral to well over 2% of the economy, for instance. Improving energy efficiency is always good, of course, but I'm not convinced there's a whole lot of low-hanging fruit that people need to be economically incentivised to implement. That said, there are projects like Erlang on Xen [0] (a bare-metal-ish system) which enable unusual deployment patterns like spinning up a VM only after a request has been received, which could, presumably, make radically more efficient use of virtualised platforms. Not sure if anyone's done this in anger though. Edit: I suppose higher prices would lead more people to do simple things like configuring their test servers to shutdown overnight and on weekends, mind [0] http://erlangonxen.org/ http://erlangonxen.org/ , also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5431392 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5431392
Twirrim 8y ago
How do you envision that actually helping in this case?
rmdashrfroot 8y ago
You sound like a California politician

diffeomorphism 8y ago

Naive question here, but how much of the time would you expect cpus in a data center to idle? Also, you save 20% of idle (which is a sizable percentage, but not much in absolute wattage) and nothing when not idle (which is much higher wattage). So how much do you save per month overall?1%, 0.1%?