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> As a society we need to start treating computational resources as finite and precious, to be utilised only when necessary, and as effectively as possible. Co

by zokier 5y ago

> As a society we need to start treating computational resources as finite and precious, to be utilised only when necessary, and as effectively as possible. Considering that on AWS potentially every millisecond of compute time and every database write is billed separately, I think the financial incentives are already there to consider computational resources precious. > Extending the life time is also the key action for datacentres Currently e.g. AWS still is actively selling m4 type ec2 instances, which were introduced in 2015 and use Haswell generation CPUs from 2013. Heck, they seem to be even selling the ancient m1 type instances through their "previous generation instance" program[1]. I think it is safe to assume that hyperscalers are squeezing every bit of use they can from old hardware. Afaik their main motivation for new hardware is to optimize energy efficiency, so that sounds exactly what the article wants. https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/previous-generation/ https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/previous-generation/

0thgen 5y ago
I think people underestimate the economic mechanisms needed to solve an issue like this. changing personal individual behavior and spouting platitudes works in disney movies, not in a society with 8-billion members
musingsole 5y ago
> I think the financial incentives are already there to consider computational resources precious. I'd argue we ARE already working with computational resources as precious commodities. If you are in an area where it matters, you consider the logistics of acquiring, retaining, and utilizing all of your CPU and memory. It's precisely this that fed the rise of AWS. So, do we need a new economy putting pricing on these resources? No! We already have it. We're just shocked at how cheap it is. But why shouldn't it be? You're messing with virtual realities where it's possible to teleport objects from one side of the universe to the other at almost no cost. Compare that with the friction of moving a real world object to the other side of your house. Thermodynamics apply. I'm pretty tired of navel gazing about the efficiency of computing when it was invented as a mechanism to increase the efficiency of the CRITICALLY inefficient systems. Your smartphone and its code are not the bottleneck in the world system. Stop optimizing the wrong parts.
littlestymaar 5y ago
AWS has incentives to reduce their footprint to a minimum, but they have an even stronger incentive to increase their consumers' resource consumption (because at the end of the day, that's what they are billing!)

by zokier 5y ago

0thgen 5y ago

I think people underestimate the economic mechanisms needed to solve an issue like this. changing personal individual behavior and spouting platitudes works in disney movies, not in a society with 8-billion members

musingsole 5y ago

> I think the financial incentives are already there to consider computational resources precious. I'd argue we ARE already working with computational resources as precious commodities. If you are in an area where it matters, you consider the logistics of acquiring, retaining, and utilizing all of your CPU and memory. It's precisely this that fed the rise of AWS. So, do we need a new economy putting pricing on these resources? No! We already have it. We're just shocked at how cheap it is. But why shouldn't it be? You're messing with virtual realities where it's possible to teleport objects from one side of the universe to the other at almost no cost. Compare that with the friction of moving a real world object to the other side of your house. Thermodynamics apply. I'm pretty tired of navel gazing about the efficiency of computing when it was invented as a mechanism to increase the efficiency of the CRITICALLY inefficient systems. Your smartphone and its code are not the bottleneck in the world system. Stop optimizing the wrong parts.

littlestymaar 5y ago

AWS has incentives to reduce their footprint to a minimum, but they have an even stronger incentive to increase their consumers' resource consumption (because at the end of the day, that's what they are billing!)