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A company would save greater than half a million metric tons of carbon annually by putting their data center in Iceland. A typical server uses 1 ton / year. No
by tlb 17y ago
A company would save greater than half a million metric tons of carbon annually by putting their data center in Iceland.
A typical server uses 1 ton / year. Not many companies have more than half a million servers. Perhaps only about 2 companies.
- stcredzero 17y agoJust how many data centers have even close to 100,000 machines in them? There can't be that many of them, but the article makes this sound commonplace. There are probably quite a few installations with 100's and 1000's of machines. Once you get into 5 digit numbers, you are starting to reach rarified heights.
- rbranson 17y agoThe problem is in the explosive growth. The demand for computing power has grown dramatically over the last few years because of the shift to cloud computing and the fact that people are expecting "smarter and smarter" and "more and more" and "faster and faster." If Google had 10x the datacenter capacity, it could (theoretically) crawl the web 10x faster and return more up to date results.
- pyre 17y agoIf you really want to get picky though, more web crawling from Google means more energy usage on the other end of the line (the crawled server).
- tlb 17y agoI just talked to a guy who's building a data center with 13 MW power input. I assume that includes air conditioning, so if a typical machine + overhead is 130 watts that's 100,000 machines. It might take a while before they fill that even half way.