

Power, Pollution and the Internet - 001sky
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/23/technology/data-centers-waste-vast-amounts-of-energy-belying-industry-image.html

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mckoss
This story is a hack job. The reporter (James Glanz) is fascinated by quoting
large numbers and pointing to the "waste". There are so many flaws in this
piece I hardly know where to begin.

From an economic argument, data center operators have a profit motive. A
profitable enterprise consumes less "resource" than it consumes (as long as
they are not subsidized by the government). So it's obvious that they are
doing something valuable for the economy regardless of the residual "wasted"
resources.

Compare to other human activities, where "waste" can be identified. If you
live in a home that has a bedroom that you only use 8 hours a day, do we decry
the 66% of waste that the home represents?

How about comparing the total energy costs of buying a physical book in a
bookstore to downloading it to a Kindle? I have no doubt the new mode
represents a savings of several orders of magnitude less energy consumed. But
Mr. Glanz wants us to be outraged that the power distribution network wastes
30% of the minuscule amount of energy required to send it to me over the
Internet.

Had he not wanted to write a sensationalized piece, he could have been more
helpful in explaining data centers on a human level. How many watts of
electricity are being spent in data centers on my behalf? Rather than
sensationalize a "300 million watts" number for Google data centers, he could
have said Google expends 3 watts per US household...but that number is not
going to scare anyone.

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btipling
Seems like FUD. The title has 'pollution' but the article only has one mention
of pollution:

> The pollution from data centers has increasingly been cited by the
> authorities for violating clean air regulations, documents show. In Silicon
> Valley, many data centers appear on the state government’s Toxic Air
> Contaminant Inventory, a roster of the area’s top stationary diesel
> polluters.

There is some interesting information, but reads as if it wants to be some
kind of scandalous exposé with all the off the record quotes.

I like the proposed solution though:

> "Some industry experts believe a solution lies in the cloud: centralizing
> computing among large and well-operated data centers."

This of course doesn't always meet needs. Sometimes you need bare metal and
your own network for security or latency reasons like maybe in the finance
industry where milliseconds matter.

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uvdiv
I like how they suggest data centers be more like supercomputers. Why are
supercomputers using 100% of their CPU time, while data centers are siting
around _wasting_ it.

 _Some companies, academic organizations and research groups have shown that
vastly more efficient practices are possible, although it is difficult to
compare different types of tasks._

 _The National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center, which consists of
clusters of servers and mainframe computers at the Lawrence Berkeley National
Laboratory in California, ran at 96.4 percent utilization in July, said Jeff
Broughton, the director of operations. The efficiency is achieved by queuing
up large jobs and scheduling them so that the machines are running nearly
full-out, 24 hours a day._

Brought to you by the _Times'_ best and brightest.

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001sky
Forbes: Why the New York Times Story "Power, Pollution, and the Internet" is a
Sloppy Failure

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4562345>

