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Widebody airliners aren't doing much for the climate, either.
by ncmncm 4y ago
Widebody airliners aren't doing much for the climate, either.
- ben_w 4y agoWhile true, I think the point is more about how minuscule 21 MW is when considered in isolation — 0.001 percent of global electricity usage.
- ncmncm 4y agoIn other news, only 100,000 of these would match the whole world's power draw.
- ben_w 4y agoIn the same way as it "only" costs 100,000 avocado toasts to buy a nice house.
- ncmncm 4y agoAnybody not boggled over the idea of their program burning 21 MW for as long as it runs either can never be impressed with anything, or has no head for numbers. Computation demanding power that could hurl a fully loaded jumbo jet into the sky is not something most of us will ever code.
- jeffbee 4y agoMany who have worked at AWS, Meta, Google, Apple, or Microsoft have had access to resources on that scale. That's hundreds of thousands of engineers by now, if not millions. You may be right that it's not most, but it's not rare either. And I personally think that running a supercluster for atmospheric modeling or whatever they intend to do with this thing is an ethically OK application of energy compared to hosting Cow Clicker or whatever.
- ncmncm 4y agoSince it is at a nuke lab, one guesses that it will mainly be for nukes. Which, technically, could have some effect on climate processes if they were to, say, initiate an end to major CO2 emission (after the cities involved finish burning down; anyway burning steel does not produce CO2, a plus.)