In my previous blog, we explored how the paradigm of computing methodologies needs to shift. We saw that the economics of the situation don't always make sense. Moving workloads to the mainframe would drastically reduce the power consumed for the same amount of computing work done. Less power consumed is less heat generate, right ?
The conventional wisdom is to use air-conditioning to lower the temperature of the computer room. These units consume even MORE energy, with no useful by-product. Since we can't (today) avoid the heat generated completely, why not harvest it & do something useful with it ? What if, instead of eliminating it, we use the heat for something ?
In renewable energy circles, heat is a prized form of energy. One of the common uses of solar energy is to heat water - which can be used for heating ones home, or for powering a heat-differential motor. Which could in turn be used to generate energy ! While the effficiency would likely never approach 100%, if coupled with a Photo-Voltaic array and some wind turbines, then perhaps they could offset 50% of the power required to run the data-centre in the first place. Couple that with conservation efforts and the cost of operating the data-centre would drop significantly.
In the North-East of the USA, the main power company - Con Edison - has pretty much told Corporate America "No more data-centres - we have no more power". Worse, the power they DO have comes from coal-fired generation stations, which are extreme polluters. So what if the Data-Centres were to generate their own power ? Google did it - they built their own hydro-electric dam in Oregon, and are (so far) the only privately-owned utility in North America. Now other companies have built their data-centres on the banks of the same river & acquire their electricity from Google.
And hydro-electric dams are a shining example of clean, renewable energy. Google did it because of the rolling brown-outs & black-outs in California. They needed power that was always available and would also allow Google to live up to their corporate mandate of "Do no evil". I like that.
The opinions expressed are purely those of the author. Opinions are like noses - everyone has one, and they are entitled to it !
2 comments:
Or one can just move to "reversible" computing. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reversible_computing
It has to do with math and physics beyond my abilities, but the bottom line is that if computers did not make things more complex they would generate less heat.
Joel - certainly an interesting theory... But is it practical ? One of the biggest challenges would be the level of access for a Data-Centre. Are there any production-ready systems in the world that could be acquired ? Having never before heard of reversible-computing, I don't personally know.
Following the same reasoning, we know that Hydrogen can be easily created & is a marvelous & clean fuel source for automobiles. But the costs of creating the infrastructure required to get hydrogen into fueling stations is wildly prohibitive. Hence, we still drive cars with fuel based on hydro-carbons.
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