Data Centers Expected to Pollute More Than Airlines by 2020 322
Dionysius, God of Wine and Leaf, writes with a link to a New York Times story on a source of pollution that doesn't leave contrails: "The world's data centers are projected to surpass the airline industry as a greenhouse gas polluter by 2020, according to a new study by McKinsey & Co. ... [C]omputer servers are used at only 6 percent of their capacity on average, while data center facilities as a whole are used at 56 percent of peak performance."
Data centers, though, might have more options for going green than airlines do, given present technology.
That seems unlikely (Score:5, Insightful)
false economies (Score:5, Insightful)
let me ask you this - what resources would be consumed if we DIDN'T use computers for these jobs? how many forests would we cut down to store the data in the worlds data centers?
i think people who write this kind of dribble lack any perspective. computers are energy savers, not wasters.
Which only makes sense (Score:4, Insightful)
RS
Nuclear power plants (Score:5, Insightful)
I am aware of the end-of-life problem surrounding nuclear power, but you got to admit that if your goal is to avoid burning stuff, you cannot get any better than this. Especially in crowded, not-so-sunny Europe, where you cannot even make a "what if we paved the desert with solar cells" hypothesis.
Anyone else remember... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Which only makes sense (Score:3, Insightful)
A little more to it, here (Score:3, Insightful)
Some newly used rack space in datacenters actually offsets other daily fuel burning - sometimes a lot of it.
Re:Nuclear power plants (Score:3, Insightful)
I'm all for nuclear power too, we need everything we can get for when the coal runs out.
Re:false economies (Score:4, Insightful)
If we measure greenhouse gas production, not as an absolute but as a percentage relative to what is actually required to do the useful component of the work, my guess would be that data centres do not work out to be that green.
I say STFU, until.... (Score:5, Insightful)
You get more radiation from eating a BANANA than you do from living next door to a nuclear power plant. And while on the subject, I used to think that these people were simply "NIMBY's", the age old Not In My Back Yard type of folks. But these people aren't NIMBY's, These people are BANANAS! Build Almost Nothing Anywhere Near Anything. They are flat out anti-progress and they do it in the nicest way "we're trying to help".
I say BULLSHIT! You have three choices: Nuclear Power, Agrarian Society, Global Warming. Pick one.
Re:Anyone else remember... (Score:2, Insightful)
Why are we comparing to the airline industry? (Score:2, Insightful)
But of course the randomly selected slashdotter has some vested interest in data centers, so we're all for any solution that doesn't involve taking away our servers. What? We are. We seem pretty ready to jump all over people who say global warming isn't real or isn't man-made. We're eager to denounce big energy corporations for milking fossil fuels for all they're worth. But as soon as someone talks about regulating *our* stuff because of energy consumption or emissions, we want to pursue other options.
Re:More Options? (Score:5, Insightful)
Until they move the large cross-Pacific network connections to the Hoover Dam, it's going to make sense to keep data centers near network lines.
Re:Gore V. Bush dogfood (Score:3, Insightful)
For those of you who are keeping score on who's talking the talk and who's walking the walk I offer this:
A tale of two houses [snopes.com]
I need to change my pants.
Re:Anyone else remember... (Score:3, Insightful)
If the people doing archaeological dating have to worry about it, I'd say it's major.
Re:Oh no! (how wrong can you be) (Score:3, Insightful)
Economy is about resources. Money is merely one storage medium, and an imperfect one at that.
Flat out wrong (Score:4, Insightful)
Electricity generation *can*, but it doesn't need to. The simple fact is that we can generate electricity without any carbon emissions with hydroelectric where available and nuclear where not. There's no justifiable reason to attribute carbon emissions from a coal fired plant to it's clients; alternatives are available, but regulators have dropped the ball in allowing coal to be used.
In 8 years, CPUs will use far less power. Ad? (Score:4, Insightful)
However, I think the major issue is this: The people who design datacenters are some of the smartest people in the world. They've certainly thought about the issues. They know the cost of electricity.
They know that Intel is delivering 45 nanometer CPU designs. They know that Intel is working on 32 nanometer CPUs, and that there will eventually be 22 nanometer processors, for delivery in 8 years. Each new processor architecture uses less power. So, the problem will solve itself, to some degree.
The article in the New York Times is ignorant, meant for ignorant readers who don't know any better. Maybe someone took money; maybe the NYT article is really a public relations stunt, a way for McKinsey & Company [wikipedia.org] to attract as clients managers who have little technical experience.
A lot of people who talk about being "green", are people who are green in the sense of having little experience.
Re:In 8 years, CPUs will use far less power. Ad? (Score:4, Insightful)
New CPUs may have much better performance/watt, but the overall performance is increased too, thus the amount of actual power used stays the same or even increases.
There's also increasingly bloated software, all this managed high level language code etc, which uses far more energy to do the same work. And modern powerful servers which sit idle for the most part.
You could easily make lower performing servers using modern techniques, and reduce power consumption hugely... Modern embedded processors are faster than high end server processors from a few years ago, and yet use a small fraction of the power, but they wouldn't be good running modern bloated apps in high level languages.
AC/DC conversion is not that wasteful (Score:5, Insightful)
Furthermore, newer data centers tend to be wired with DC power, so that there is only AC/DC conversion at the UPS. DC/DC conversion can be made even more efficient.
Contrast this with running a gasoline engine, which is about 20% efficient.
Re:Nuclear power plants (Score:5, Insightful)
Not a useful observation to make. Human activity is polluting. If you're not polluting, you're either dead or not doing anything.
Re:In 8 years, CPUs will use far less power. Ad? (Score:3, Insightful)
To guess that evident continuing improvements in computer efficiencies will cause your data center to use much more power 5 years from now will only bring on rounds of "Value Engineering" to bring the construction costs down. A good, experienced engineer will argue against those cost "savings", but will often lose.
Re:Don't forget to pay your carbon indulgences, fa (Score:3, Insightful)
that's not what is worrisome. what is worrisome is that in the antarctic, the concentration of CO2 gas has NEVER gone above 300 PPM in the past 650,000 years of antarctic ice. As of this year, at the mauna loa observatory (middle of the pacific ocean, as far away from civilization as one can get) we hit 385 PPM of CO2 gas
It's getting about time to start cloning those dinosaurs, because at the rate we're going only cold blooded reptiles will be able to survive the heat without central air.
True, the concentrations in the peak of dinosaur era are estimated as 20 times higher than they are now, but at the current rate of expansion in another 80 years we will have halved the distance to the goal of 'dinosaur CO2 levels' and another 50 years from then and we'll be at the goal line, and you can be assured that any mammal larger than a mouse is going to find itself dead from heat exhaustion, while reptiles come to rule the earth again.
the fact that humans can in 3 generations of their lifespans undo 300 million years of natural changes to the environment is frightening.
Re:No Internet by 2050 (Score:3, Insightful)
That option alone should have shut you up about "it only works when the sun shines and the wind blows." Also, you forgot geothermal energy, which is far more consistent a source than solar or wind, and (like the other renewable options) has the potential to eventually become major producers at "cheaper than coal" prices.
An 80% reduction in CO2 emissions by 2050 is a reasonable goal, without drastic cuts to our standard of living. I haven't heard anything out of your mouth to indicate otherwise; just a bunch of "No We Can't!" All the things you claim we will have to give up (other than airplanes) could be run off electricity from renewable sources. There is plenty of sun, plenty of wind, and the technology for harvesting it is getting rapidly cheaper. When it comes to computers specifically, my OLPC pulls about 5 watts, and is more than adequate for most tasks. So it seems likely that we could provide a lot of the value we derive from computers even in an energy-starved world.
An 80% reduction in CO2 emissions isn't the same as an 80% reduction in energy usage, and neither of the two necessarily equates to an 80% reduction in economic activity, and none of the preceding things requires an 80% reduction in our well-being. You could argue the last point, but hedonic studies seem to indicate that, beyond $10K/year of income, additional income does very little to make us happy. It just gets swamped by the things that money can't buy. So even if we have to reduce our consumption drastically, it may not make us feel noticeably worse off, if we go about it in the right way.
Re:In 8 years, CPUs will use far less power. Ad? (Score:3, Insightful)
My response was directed at this:
The point being that to get a SAN to deliver "I/O at speeds local disks can only dream of" you need to spend a very, very large amount of money - far more than most companies can afford to and in great disproportion to the benefits they would see.