
We used to build steel mills near cheap power, now that's where we put servers - luu
http://danluu.com/datacenter-power/
======
bsder
Unfortunately, the baseline assumption isn't correct.

Actually, we built steel mills near cheap _transportation_ , not cheap power.

Why? Because the main power source for primary steelmaking is coal (coke,
actually), not electricity. And you need cheap transport for the power source
(coal), raw materials (iron ore and such), and the finished steel. And cheap
transportation, water, helps with getting rid of heat.

Electricity is mostly used in secondary steelmaking where you are taking
already existing steel, remelting it, and adjusting its properties.

Now, _aluminum_ production is very much tied to cheap electricity. I seem to
remember that Iceland does a tremendous amount of aluminum refining because of
the cheap geothermal power.

~~~
twotwotwo
> Unfortunately, the baseline assumption isn't correct.

To quibble with that quibble, though the steel mills thing is in the title, I
wouldn't call it a "baseline assumption" of the longer discussion in the post:
the post talks about how power affects datacenter costs, with one sentence at
the end mentioning steel mills.

He links the "steel mills" phrase to a page on a Microsoft datacenter in
Quincy, WA. I don't know much about the history of that area, but I did read
that another Microsoft datacenter was built in The Dalles, OR, which had very
cheap power and historically was home to aluminum manufacturers that needed a
lot of power for the electrolytic process involved:

[http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/14/technology/14search.html?e...](http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/14/technology/14search.html?ei=&_r=0)
mentions the datacenter and that aluminum smelters were once in the area

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aluminium_smelting](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aluminium_smelting)
talks more about the process and how it takes "prodigious amounts of
electricity"

~~~
butchlugrod
Quincy, like The Dalles, is located near the Columbia River, and is an hour
drive to the Grand Coulee, Chief Joseph, Wanapum, Rock Island, and Rocky Reach
hydroelectric dams. Electricity in central Washington is very inexpensive.
Since that article was written, Dell, Yahoo, Vantage, and Sabey have all
constructed data centers in the Quincy area.

~~~
AllexS
Also note that a very large reason for constructing Rocky Reach Dam on the
Columbia was to provide power for an Alcoa Aluminum plant that is still
heavily dependent on cheap energy prices. Chelan, Douglas and Grant counties
all have nearly the cheapest power rates the the country.

------
beat
I live just across the river from a recently-retired Ford plant in St Paul.
The plant had its own dedicated hydroelectric dam on the Mississippi (before
you're shocked, the Mississippi just isn't very big in Minneapolis as rivers
go, and it was whitewater there before being developed).

I keep waiting for someone to buy up that location to build a giant data
center - Amazon, Google, someone like that. It's a beautiful spot with clean
dedicated power, in the heart of a metro area full of enterprise operations
talent.

------
listic
FWIW, the site is blocked in Russia, though the most regular proxy works
around it just fine, yet.

I wonder what _have_ the author written to trigger the censorship filter.

The halter of censorship is pressing ever stronger. Пора валить :(

------
willholloway
Solar panel prices have dropped to a point where we are about to enter an era
of energy cost deflation. This is an incredible human achievement, and the
climate and economic benefits will be enormous.

The US was muddling its way out the 2008 crash repercussions, with incremental
improvement in the economy. It wasn't until the oil-choke collar on the
economy was removed that we saw a return to the low unemployment levels we are
seeing today.

Energy costs are a tax on everything we do, and we are in for a global energy
tax cut.

The American Southwest has tremendous solar resources, and could be the
cheapest place to run data centers in the states if we could develop:

1\. Lower cost electricity storage, compressed air, new batteries, or
superconducting magnetic energy storage could do it.

2\. Develop economical solar thermal air conditioning systems. If you can
generate heat, you can generate cold.
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_air_conditioning](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_air_conditioning)

~~~
outworlder
Where can I source panels that cheap, if I'm not in the US.

Genuine question, I'd really want to know.

~~~
grecy
My parents in Australia just paid $10k AUD for 5KW fully installed including
the inverter and "smart meter".

(the government later reimbursed them $5k of that, though that's not really
relevant)

------
krampian
Actually that is still a pretty good location for steel mills, as well as
other industries, like Bitcoin mining farms (perhaps those fall under
datacenters...).

------
twotwotwo
++luu for an interesting read.

One thought on hardware acceleration: it may be kind of happening, piece by
piece. AES-NI, carry-less multiply, and CRC32 instructions are kind of like
smallish (in gate area) accelerators of operations that go much easier in
hardware. AMD talked about a compression accelerator for their (now-delayed)
A1100 ARM server chip. These are marketed as performance features, not as
power-saving, but if you can do something in fewer clock cycles without a ton
of area, you are often saving on power as well.

It's also possible that some savings come through finding places where slower
chips will do the job because RAM and/or disk and/or bandwidth is the limiter
(storage, caching, maybe some proxies and scale-out DBs now running on faster
chips). Intel has server Atoms (Avoton, Rangeley) and there are experiments
with ARM servers (Baidu cloud storage tried them out:
[https://gigaom.com/2013/02/20/first-arm-based-servers-in-
pro...](https://gigaom.com/2013/02/20/first-arm-based-servers-in-production-
support-baidus-cloud-storage/)). There's lots of work on ARMs and Atoms on the
consumer side and some of the benefits may spill over to low-power servers.
Don't know how widespread this will be, though; I've been rooting for the
concept of servers on low-power chips for years and haven't seen much yet.

You also pay for higher power dissipation with lower density. If you're Amazon
or some huge provider, you can be talking about a lot of space in absolute
terms.

It's interesting to eyeball a latest-gen Facebook Open Compute server with
high-wattage CPUs in it, and how much of its height seems to be due to those
heatsinks and fans: [http://images.anandtech.com/doci/9138/leopard-
mob.jpg](http://images.anandtech.com/doci/9138/leopard-mob.jpg)

SeaMicro sadly didn't succeed, but it's interesting they thought people wanted
density enough to make it a key part of their marketing, and AMD thought
enough of the idea to buy them:
[http://www.brightsideofnews.com/Data/2012_9_11/AMD-
Expands-S...](http://www.brightsideofnews.com/Data/2012_9_11/AMD-Expands-
SeaMicro-Big-Data-Gets-a-High-Performance-Home/AMD_SeaMicro7_689.jpg)

Of course, companies using and selling blade servers and the popularity of <1U
configs (e.g., SuperMicro's twin servers:
[http://www.supermicro.com/products/nfo/1UTwin.cfm](http://www.supermicro.com/products/nfo/1UTwin.cfm),
Microsoft's blade-y variation on the idea:
[http://www.anandtech.com/show/9138/open-compute-hardware-
tri...](http://www.anandtech.com/show/9138/open-compute-hardware-tried-and-
tested/9), even that Facebook Open Compute layout which fits 3 boxes in 2U)
demonstrate some interest in density.

------
imglorp
Being near a river wouldn't hurt for heat dissipation either.

~~~
wyldfire
Using a waterway as a heat sink for a server farm may not sound as bad as
dumping waste, but it's bound to have an impact on the wildlife there.

~~~
TheGRS
I think the heat alone would disrupt a river ecosystem.

