Alert to computer overheating

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Alert to computer overheating




by freddau » 24/06/07, 10:51

These will be the industrial zones of the XNUMXst century, without workers and linked by optical fiber. They are just beginning to spread near the large hydroelectric dams in the northeast of the United States. Soon, they could surround nuclear power plants under construction in emerging countries. Over thousands of hectares, these complexes will concentrate the power of the new dominant industry: online computing. In their concrete blocks, hermetic to the curiosities of the outside world, the conglomerates of the triumphant Web, the Google, Microsoft, Yahoo! or Ask.com, will pile up tens of thousands of servers, capable of memorizing billions of emails, texts, films, music and finding them in the blink of an eye.

Why will they seek to place these reinvented factories so close to power generation sites? Because the laws of physics began to catch up with an economic sector that claimed to have abolished them. Between 2000 and 2005, the power consumption of computer centers doubled, reaching 45 billion kilowatt hours, for an annual total of $ 7,2 billion worldwide. In the United States, this still represents only 1,2% of national consumption, according to a recent study published by a researcher from Berkeley (California). But if nothing corrects the trend, total server consumption will have increased by 76% in 2010. And still, this study, funded by the microprocessor manufacturer AMD, probably gives only a minimal estimate of the magnitude of this explosion. It does not take into account the latest Google centers, whose exact population of servers, around 450 units, is kept secret.

"Our dear computer is among the most inefficient devices ever invented, writes expert Timothy Prickett Morgan. Most of the electricity that powers it is released in the form of heat, noise and light." According to Urs Hölzle, vice president of Google, "a PC wastes about half of its energy, and a server wastes a third". For a long time, this wasted expense went unnoticed in data center budgets. The computer world blindly followed Moore's Law: computing power doubled every year, or almost, the cost of components kept falling. The energy inefficient systems were of no concern to anyone.

It is now a priority, and not only because of the increase in the price of electricity. In their relentless miniaturization, processors have approached their physical limits, which results in intense heating. In recent years, their manufacturers have had to divide them into "multi-core" chips to prevent them from reaching the temperature of the Sun around 2015.

In data centers, where the number of servers has continued to increase, the heat has not been reduced. Air conditioning expenses further increased the amount of the electricity bill. The phenomenon has been amplified by the massive use of web mastodons with inexpensive devices, much less energy efficient than high-end computers. Soon, acquiring one of these bargain-priced machines will be less expensive than using it in one year.

With several moves ahead, Google is trying to get around the difficulty by geography. The company has just built in Oregon, on the banks of the Columbia River, the precursor of the big data centers to come, with their hot air evacuation devices clearly visible. Upstream of the site, a hydroelectric dam provides computers with an uninterrupted and much cheaper source of supply than in urban centers. Microsoft and Yahoo! will set up their own facilities near other dams further north.

But these behemoths know that this race for energy will not provide a long-term solution. Without further effort, the evil will only grow. In factories of information will end up aggregating the outsourced servers of banks, eager for computing power which they begin to find excessive bill in their premises in the city center. These massive displacements towards dams and power stations will be at the origin of substantial savings but also of frightening effects of image.

These risk brutally associating companies from a virtual world with the most burning difficulties of the real world: overconsumption of energy, greenhouse gas emissions and the contribution to global warming. To the protesters who may one day gather in front of their fenced-in enclosures, these firms will not always be able to answer that the global network will ultimately reduce air travel, from colloquiums to meetings, or that online sales have reduced local travel. .

In fact, it is the whole of the actors of data processing which seek as of today not to be accused of generalized waste. The heavyweights of the sector have just come together in a joint environmental association (The Climate Savers Computing Initiative) to find ways to make computers more economical, less polluting. Google is also highlighting its action in favor of solar energy, by developing a battery of panels that will provide 30% of the power for its Californian headquarters in Mountain View.

Beyond these publicized announcements, everyone strives in their field to bring their share of solution. Processor and server manufacturers want to reconcile increased performance with the fight against heat and consumption. IBM has just announced the design of chips with billions of microholes that will facilitate the flow of current and therefore limit losses and overheating. Air conditioning specialists say that it will soon be necessary to abandon the supply air to switch to cooling by fluids.

"When buying new equipment, the cost of its electricity consumption is emerging as a more determining criterion than the computing power", says François Bourdoncle, CEO of the search engine Exalead. However, this awareness will only produce limited effects if the sector does not change its philosophy, insist many experts. If the computer does not give up the bad habits of its years of abundance to return to the "frugal computer" of its beginnings, according to the specialized blogger Nicholas Carr. “The servers used by a single company are only operating from 10% to 30% of their capacity,” he writes. This under-utilization, linked to the fact that the machines are dedicated to only one program, is the main cause of the increasing waste.

Several complex processes have been devised to allow servers to work on several programs at the same time, thus optimizing the performance of data centers by up to 80%. A way to wait more comfortably that Moore's law one day reaches an insurmountable limit, and that the revolutionary invention of another means of calculating transforms giant data centers into new industrial wasteland.

Jerome Fenoglio

http://www.lemonde.fr/web/article/0,1-0 ... 759,0.html
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by Flytox » 24/06/07, 11:37

Hello

What a blah blah to break open doors .....
Yes .... they waste electricity and other things .... but what is it compared to the rest of the waste .... which nobody talks about.

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by Christophe » 24/06/07, 12:36

Yes Flytox.

I do not understand well the interest of this article because it is necessary to relate this to something relative: how much CO2 and energy consumption to make 1 € of GDP (so dear to our managers and financiers) in IT compared to more traditional industrial sectors? The kg of CO2 / GDP have only dropped since the 70s in industrialized countries, this is a direct consequence of computerization because, for example, an email ca emits less CO2 than a postal envelope ...

I believe that some foundries have furnaces of 1 MW (André correct me) of furnace power ... the equivalent of 10 Internet servers undoubtedly generating much more "wealth" ...

Otherwise the:

"Our dear computer is one of the most inefficient devices ever invented, writes specialist Timothy Prickett Morgan (...) a PC wastes about half of its energy, and a server wastes a third"


... is quite laughable, apparently the dear specialist does not know that his car has a poorer performance than that of his pc ... and given the power of individual pc, the comparison is useless between the pc park and the car park worldwide ...
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