3 ms·
Is the electricity cost negligible? It's a pretty compute intensive application. Of course it would be a tiny fraction of the $10m figure here, but even 1% wou
by jfengel 2y ago
Is the electricity cost negligible? It's a pretty compute intensive application.
Of course it would be a tiny fraction of the $10m figure here, but even 1% would be $100,000. Negligible to Google, but for Google even $10 million is couch cushion money.
- stavros 2y agoI feel like your comment answers itself: If you have the money to be running a datacenter of thousands of A100 GPUs (or equivalent), the cost of the electricity is negligible to you, and definitely worth training a SOTA model with your spare compute.
- dylan604 2y agoIs it really spare compute? Is the demand from others so low that these systems are truly idle? Does this also artificially make it look like demand is high because internal tasks are using it?
- dekhn 2y agoThe electricity cost is not neglible- I ran a service that had multiples of $10M in marginal electricity spend (IE, servers running at 100% utilization, consuming a significantly higher fraction than when idle, or partly idle). Ultimately, the scientific discoveries weren't worth the cost, so we shut the service down. $10M is about what Google would spend to get a publication in a top-tier journal. But google's internal pricing and costs don't look anything like what people cite for external costs; it's more like a state-supported economy with some extremely rich oligarch-run profit centers that feed all the various cottage industries.