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What's crazy to me is that a bunch of servers in AC cooled room consumes more power than entire villages in Europe suffering from this heat. Imagine being on y

What's crazy to me is that a bunch of servers in AC cooled room consumes more power than entire villages in Europe suffering from this heat. Imagine being on your phone tweeting, instagram stories, whatsapp messages in the blistering weather while the databases and servers receiving and delivering data sits comfortably in AC cooled buildings. Does anybody find this contrast just eerie?

radicaldreamer 4y ago
And they have AC, whereas many private homes in villages have never had air conditioning.
hunter2_ 4y ago
Imagine if our workloads only did the minimum calculations necessary to achieve the associated user stories, instead of constantly rebuilding from massive dependency trees and all the other inefficiencies we put up with because it takes less dev effort that way and our performance budgets are being met either way. Most places have emissions requirements for vehicles and so forth. Maybe some day we'll demand energy-efficient programming.
- londons_explore 4y ago
  A tax on energy effectively incentiviszes efficient use of compute. Today cloud providers deliberately site their facilities to make use of the cheapest tax-free electricity, which is effectively tax dodging.
  - upupandup 4y ago
    I would take this further and find out what is the most energy intensive computing task across these DCs and attack those first. This is a huge unknown for me as I have no statistics on what activities result in the most energy usage in these DCs but if I have to guess, it is probably GPU/Database. I would also tax personal data. Current regulatory framework strangely assumes that personal data has no value yet entire companies are built around monetizing and claiming it as theirs. Those companies are also the biggest consumers of these DCs. Even by taxing personal data that is being used by companies, you could realize significant energy savings as they have to discern between what they need and what they dont. Asking for someones driver license to verify their account? Tax them yearly. Suddenly companies that dont really need it find themselves searching for more energy efficient solutions since their tax dollars depend on this activity. Unfortunately, we may not see this happen for quite some time.
    - londons_explore 4y ago
      > I would take this further and find out what is the most energy intensive computing task across these DCs Nearly all compute power in the world is used doing things that theoretically take no compute. The reason they use so much compute is it was easier to pay for that compute than pay some engineer to figure out how to use less.
- rbranson 4y ago
  This makes a pretty big assumption that the only energy consumed by software is in what's required to execute the code.
  - netr0ute 4y ago
    That doesn't compute, because energy consumed by software is literally in what's required to execute the code by definition.
    - outworlder 4y ago
      I believe the parent is talking about all the power overhead that's used even when there are no instructions running.
- plonk 4y ago
  > constantly rebuilding from massive dependency trees and all the other inefficiencies we put up with because it takes less dev effort that way and our performance budgets are being met either way I've been trying to minimise redundant calculations in our CI/CD workflows, but none of our tools seem to like that. Docker rebuilds all downstream if one bit of a step changes, GitHub Actions doesn't let you cache on local runners and requires uploading everything to their size-limited cloud cache. I'm looking for better ways but of course no service advertises their energy efficiency. That tells something about the industry's priorities.

radicaldreamer 4y ago

And they have AC, whereas many private homes in villages have never had air conditioning.

hunter2_ 4y ago

Imagine if our workloads only did the minimum calculations necessary to achieve the associated user stories, instead of constantly rebuilding from massive dependency trees and all the other inefficiencies we put up with because it takes less dev effort that way and our performance budgets are being met either way. Most places have emissions requirements for vehicles and so forth. Maybe some day we'll demand energy-efficient programming.

londons_explore 4y ago
A tax on energy effectively incentiviszes efficient use of compute. Today cloud providers deliberately site their facilities to make use of the cheapest tax-free electricity, which is effectively tax dodging.
- upupandup 4y ago
  I would take this further and find out what is the most energy intensive computing task across these DCs and attack those first. This is a huge unknown for me as I have no statistics on what activities result in the most energy usage in these DCs but if I have to guess, it is probably GPU/Database. I would also tax personal data. Current regulatory framework strangely assumes that personal data has no value yet entire companies are built around monetizing and claiming it as theirs. Those companies are also the biggest consumers of these DCs. Even by taxing personal data that is being used by companies, you could realize significant energy savings as they have to discern between what they need and what they dont. Asking for someones driver license to verify their account? Tax them yearly. Suddenly companies that dont really need it find themselves searching for more energy efficient solutions since their tax dollars depend on this activity. Unfortunately, we may not see this happen for quite some time.
  - londons_explore 4y ago
    > I would take this further and find out what is the most energy intensive computing task across these DCs Nearly all compute power in the world is used doing things that theoretically take no compute. The reason they use so much compute is it was easier to pay for that compute than pay some engineer to figure out how to use less.
rbranson 4y ago
This makes a pretty big assumption that the only energy consumed by software is in what's required to execute the code.
- netr0ute 4y ago
  That doesn't compute, because energy consumed by software is literally in what's required to execute the code by definition.
  - outworlder 4y ago
    I believe the parent is talking about all the power overhead that's used even when there are no instructions running.
plonk 4y ago
> constantly rebuilding from massive dependency trees and all the other inefficiencies we put up with because it takes less dev effort that way and our performance budgets are being met either way I've been trying to minimise redundant calculations in our CI/CD workflows, but none of our tools seem to like that. Docker rebuilds all downstream if one bit of a step changes, GitHub Actions doesn't let you cache on local runners and requires uploading everything to their size-limited cloud cache. I'm looking for better ways but of course no service advertises their energy efficiency. That tells something about the industry's priorities.