What is Digg?55 Comments
- Spaceomega, on 10/11/2007, -12/+31I love Google.
- kjcdude, on 10/11/2007, -0/+19"tens of thousands of servers in Google's server farm"
-from the article
"Over 450,000 servers"
-from wikipedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_platform - superal1394, on 10/11/2007, -3/+20fail
- Nick22, on 10/11/2007, -8/+25More than you have braincells.
- orangester, on 10/11/2007, -2/+13Is there anything Google can't do?
- Redemption289, on 10/11/2007, -1/+11avoid increasingly silly lawsuites
- VeganBob, on 10/11/2007, -2/+9Create a technical problem so difficult that even they can't solve.
- geminitojanus, on 10/11/2007, -2/+7"Create a technical problem so difficult that even they can't solve."
Solving it is no problem (42). Defining the problem, whoa man, watch out.. - geminitojanus, on 10/11/2007, -0/+5"If they "believe" it can be offered, why don't they leverage some of their significant manpower and money pile and "offer" it, or at least subsidise getting it into domestic computers and everyone else's servers?"
Believe it or not, Google isn't a server manufacturer, they're a data storage warehouse and search engine company. That's why they went to Intel and HP and have started drafting standards that could be used to build these 12V power supplies. They're leveraging the money in the best way that they can: by influencing manufacturers instead of becoming a manufacturer and suffering from the overhead and setup costs of moving to an entirely new business sector.
They're doing exactly what they need to do. - geminitojanus, on 10/11/2007, -1/+5They're doing it because economically, it makes sense. More efficient power supplies means less wasted power means less power necessary to run their servers, lowering costs, even if the initial cost of these power supplies is a bit higher. They're setting up the standards necessary to mass-manufacture these devices, which means the prices will be cut significantly.
They rate efficiency based on the rate of energy being used to power the computer verses the amount of energy taken in from the wall (in other words, the efficiency of the conversion from 120V AC to 12V DC in this case). - inactive, on 10/11/2007, -1/+5It's one thing to say "Don't be evil."
It's another to start realizing it. Kudos to Google. - reventlov, on 10/11/2007, -0/+2@darknessgp
1. The amount of power delivered as a percentage of the power required by power supply. In other words. Their target is to have a power supply that, to keep the math simple, draws 100W from the wall and deliveres 90W to the computer.
2. It will save them a lot of money. That, before anything, is their priority. It has the bonus advantage of making a nice press release. Computers draw a remarkable amount of power in this world and a lot of it goes to waste at heat. In theory, a room full of servers that generates less heat (vs. before) will take less power to cool, further reducing costs. - geminitojanus, on 10/11/2007, -0/+2"Older CPU's draw on less power and provide more performance for what little power they draw compared toa core 2 duo or something."
You got so close too.. The words you were looking for were "Performance to Watt ratio". The Core 2 processor ranks up there with the POWER5 in this category. [For reference, wide RISC machines like the UltraSPARC IV and T1 lead the pack, along with IBM's Power6, and Intel's and HP's wonderchild the Itanium II, but all of these machines are much more expensive than the commodity Opterons and Cores of the world]. This comes after datacenters and supercomputer manufacturers got incredibly pissed at Intel for their lousy PtW ratios with the Netburst series of processors.
Google, and other clustering computer manufacturers, look specifically at their world loads, and pick processors based on exactly how they perform on those work loads and real world Performance to Watt ratios along with Cost per Unit, Cost per Performance, and Cost per Watt ratios (and often Cost per Performance to Watt for an exact breakdown of which processor is cheaper to own over its entire lifecycle). The Core 2 will widely replace Pentium 4 Xeons currently in service in supercomputers when they hit their lifetime performance yields in a year or two from now (it can take upwards of three years for a chip to hit the end of its performance life in a purchase cycle).
This is exactly why AMD sabotaged themselves by making decisions to change their sockets so frequently; less frequent changes means less infrastructure to rip up the next time you want to change your configurations around. AMD wants you to buy a whole new datacenter every time they drop a new processor on you (new RAM, new motherboard, new processor, likely new cooling apparatuses too); Intel has optimized their processor construction to do in place upgrades, buying every component as you need it.
To bring this back around, why do you think Google canceled its larger orders for AMD machines? It's very probable that after they realized AMD was about to undergo yet another platform shift, that they simply found the company to be too flighty and risky to buy machines from. And this is from a company who specializes in buying the cheapest (yet most efficient) machines they can get their hands on, and actually does *science* to find the right components (including studies on RAM, hard drives, and cache performance, some of which have been publicly published for peer review). I'm not saying Intel's a saint of a company (I'd personally love to see Google buy Sun and put IBM out of its prolonged misery), but in this case, the Core 2 is a definite all-star. - gtdawg, on 10/11/2007, -1/+3Another efficient idea for datacenters is having all the servers draw DC power from one huge AC -> DC rectifier which is much more efficient as well. We were looking at these for use in our datacenter.
http://www.rackablesystems.com/solutions/greencompute.htm - Comatose51, on 10/11/2007, -0/+2Not really actually. At my previous job we've looked at both using them and investing in them (my previous job was at hedge fund). After studying what they offered, we did neither. If you're building a new infrastructure, it might be worth starting off with them. However, to completely replace your current AC infrastructure with DC would be more expensive than what you will save. Also a good part of our energy cost was the cost of running air conditioners, which DC and centralized power supplies might have helped some but not all that much.
To sum it up, the efficiency difference between DC and AC is not that great that you would want to replace your current investment in AC with DC. - sum1randum, on 10/11/2007, -3/+5Why are so many Diggers against capitalism and success?
- antonio97b, on 10/11/2007, -0/+290% efficency 10% inefficiency?
- HumphreyB, on 10/11/2007, -2/+3One day.
- abcdefghij, on 10/11/2007, -1/+2don't ask what Google can't do for you, ask what you can't do for Google.. wait, ask what you can.. or can't.. aaarrgh!!
- HappyScrappy, on 10/11/2007, -1/+2Google was on that track months ago (look at past articles).
It doesn't actually save power to send DC around the room.
You'll save somewhat on equipment costs (fewer smoothing capacitors), but you don't save appreciable power.
If you read the link you posted, it says the savings comes from getting the rectifiers out of the machine room, basically moving heat outside so you don't have to cool it.
Google would save money very easily going to higher AC voltages, like 250V in the server room instead of just to the UPS and 120V from there on. US 240V split phase or 208V three phase would work find if you can find power supplies that take it. Otherwise use UK-style 250V.
Google's (new) idea of 12V within the cabinet isn't bad. But I can't see it catching on with regular people. For people like you and me that don't have your machine running full-bore 24/7, we'll spend more to go all-12V and never make it back because we don't use enough power. Honestly, if Google is going to make custom systems, why not go to 20V instead? Go as high as you can without having to use special chips. 18V or 20V works with regular power supply chips, much higher requires special additional chips which would increase cost. - geminitojanus, on 10/11/2007, -0/+1Google isn't asserting it's easy. Google's asserting it's startling we haven't. See the difference?
More efficient power supplies means less heat generation (more energy is being converted, less is going to generate heat), less need for loud fans, smarter components. They're not even saying these things will be cheap; they quite frankly say they're going to be more expensive up front, and thusly they are trying to standardize the more efficient power ratings so that they will be easier to adopt and put into production.
Of course, more energy will be saved by simply not letting processors use cycles when they don't need to, that's a given. Furthermore, it's a given that most people have their PCs on at least half of the daytime (8 hours in a typical office), and that during that time, we're wasting a great deal of energy simply trying to convert energy from one form to another. By killing that waste, and by making power supplies standard to one voltage, we cut down on the need to make power supply engineering much more complicated that it already is, and we can focus on killing power usage in the individual components (we're taking the burden off the shoulders of power supplies from losing too much energy, and moving the burden to components).
At the component level, there's a war to be waged: competition. Competition in performance per watt is virtually stagnate in anything EXCEPT processor technologies, which is a damned shame, considering hard drives in typical desktop computers are left spinning all the time just in case we need to pull something from them, fans are kept running all the time just to keep ambient heat levels down, and components are left on just because someone might use them (and a large part of the time they go unused). Unused PCI lanes can be completely turned off, clocks that aren't being used can be shut down to tell the components on the ends of those clocks to enter a suspended state. We've already got all of the standards we need in place to control these things, we just need to re-clarify them, make them easier to do, and make them more prevalent.
Google's spurring desktop, server manufacturers to think like laptop engineers: cooler, faster, more durable, less wasteful. - Iamonacomputer, on 10/11/2007, -3/+4Google OS??
- youngteam, on 10/11/2007, -1/+1Only if you're using a CRT.
- arjie, on 10/11/2007, -1/+1Now, if you were using Firefox, you could take the initiative and use the Stylish extension to achieve that. Nice, no?
- qwertydvorak, on 10/11/2007, -1/+1google should build a nuclear plant and sell the excess power to the rest of silicon valley.
- HappyScrappy, on 10/11/2007, -1/+1No.
'Rather than waste the electricity and incur the additional costs for cooling, Google has power supplies specially made that are 90% efficient. "It's not hard to do. That's why to me it's personally offensive" that standard power supplies aren't as efficient, he said.'
Google says making power supplies that are 90% efficient is "not hard" (i.e. easy), in fact it's so easy it's personally offensive that others don't do it.
Except it isn't easy.
Reducing the number of rails in a PC-type power supply doesn't increase efficiency much. It does reduce complexity though.
I'm glad Google wants to save money. I wish they were more directly concerned with saving power (as locating in Washington where electric rates are low doesn't save power, just money).
But going all 12V doesn't make sense for most of us. It will increase the cost (which is usually derived from the energy used to build something) of our machines, and since we don't run our servers heavily 24/7, we won't ever get the money back. I fully support a separate server standard for power supplies and mobos that uses 12V inside the case (except really, they should go closer to 20V, as I mentioned above). But I find this article insulting and ridiculous when they try to say it applies to all of us and act like they're awesome when it comes to saving power when just 3 months ago they thought that DC power distribution (between units, i.e. across data centers) was a great way to save power (again, see my post above and a link from someone else, it is no more efficient).
I do agree that mobos are rarely rated on power usage (although Silent PC Review does it), and this is because chipsets are rarely rated on power usage (although I would not Intel brags their new chipset uses under 20W). However, working with PC manufacturers (like HP) won't do much to fix this. Google would have to work with chipset designers (Intel, NVidia, etc.) to fix their designs. In the meantime, perhaps they could make their servers with mobile chipsets. Apple makes all their current machines (except perhaps the Mac Pro) with mobile chipsets. iMac and Mac Mini use Merom (mobile) Core 2 Duos and the mobile chipset.
I have to say I strongly agree about saving clocks and such as you say at the end. This is why it disgusts me that anandtech does their review of the new Intel G35 chipset and shows idle power with Speedstep disabled to show "typical customer idle power usage". The typical customer should have Speedstep on, and XP in a power mode that will utilize it. Intel has to design their chipsets to idle (as you say), and then people have to learn to switch it on. Probably the biggest power saver that could happen isn't new power supplies or new chipsets, but merely for people to turn on the power saving features on the machines they have. Everyone should have them on by default, not off by default.
Score one for Apple, their machines all have the power saving capabilities, and they ship them with them on by default. Most of the features (like processor idling) you can't even turn off under Mac OS X. - inactive, on 10/11/2007, -1/+1I use the rhetorical on a regular basis. It's because I don't think people are beyond comprehension.
- inactive, on 10/11/2007, -1/+1There is no reason we can't coexist. Survivability depends on it, in the long run.
- LiveFastDieOld, on 10/11/2007, -1/+1Dude. http://www.google.com/search?q=define%3Agreenback
"Greenback" is slang for any paper money. - tyywebb, on 10/11/2007, -1/+1They could save power worldwide by changing their background to black.
- ares623, on 10/11/2007, -1/+1yey for Google! that's great to know.
- inactive, on 10/11/2007, -1/+1This question's been already asked above, you stupid moron.
- sum1randum, on 10/11/2007, -1/+1Take a look @ "Cradle to Cradle" by William McDonough. I've attended a couple of his lectures and what he has to say changes the way you think about environmentalism. Pretty cool way to frame the call to saving our planet in economic terms that corporations listen to. Take a look at what he did with the new River Rouge plant for Ford.
- subxero37, on 10/11/2007, -5/+4By the image on http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_platform it looks like they were using IBM DeathStars for storage (er, DeskStars, whatever) -- hope they're not still using the DeskStar line (now owned by Hitachi.) DeskStars are notorious for their catastrophic failures.
(See: http://www.astro.ufl.edu/~ken/crash/index.html )
Beyond that, Google's platform is incredible. My school is throwing out old Pentium II-based machines, and most Celerons and Pentium IIIs, when it looks like Google is mostly based on those processors. Who says Pentium IIs are slow? -- they're pretty wicked fast, collectively, if you've got more than 100,000 of them. - DarknessGP, on 10/11/2007, -2/+1Well, 2 questions. 1) How do they rate efficiency? 2) Does anyone really think Google is doing this for more than just saving on their power bill?
- Comatose51, on 10/11/2007, -2/+1It's not so much as not being evil as a lot of times being green also offers savings in the long run. Preaching to people about energy efficiency didn't motivate them to change their habits until oil prices shot up and CFL and hybrids became all the rage. Even "evil" Microsoft is fairly green as well.
- fkr3, on 10/11/2007, -3/+2If they "believe" it can be offered, why don't they leverage some of their significant manpower and money pile and "offer" it, or at least subsidise getting it into domestic computers and everyone else's servers?
- jeo77, on 10/11/2007, -4/+3No.
- Comatose51, on 10/11/2007, -2/+1@subxero37: From what I've read about Google's architecture, that's not really that big of an issue since most of their information is distributed many times across their infrastructure and a great deal of it is keep in memory, not on disk.
- sannm, on 10/11/2007, -5/+4Keep you from asking stupid questions.
- pkonink, on 10/11/2007, -2/+1GoggleOS~YouOS ??
https://www.youos.com/ - HappyScrappy, on 10/11/2007, -2/+1Despite what Google asserts, it is difficult to make an AC power supply that is 90% efficient. It is easy to make one that is 75%->80% efficient. Look for an 80plus rated power supply. They're 80% efficient over a broad range of power levels. These are very common. Major companies like Seasonic and Antec (actually, Seasonic makes all of Antec's 80plus certified supplies) make 80plus power supplies.
Just so you know, the average person would save more money by making sure they have AMD Cool n' Quiet/Intel Speedstep enabled and XP's power mode set to 'minimal power management', 'portable/laptop' or 'max battery life'. If you use any of these 3 modes and install the CnQ SW or turn on Speedstep, then Windows will turn your CPU voltage down or temporarily turn off the CPU where appropriate, reducing your power consumption about 30% in normal (non-gaming) situations. This will impact your performance only a minute amount, and you can always switch back to one of the other 3 power modes (like desktop or presentation mode) temporarily if you really are worried about your CPU not ramping up correctly during games. - edebolt, on 10/11/2007, -2/+1haha because the average Digger is jealous of people with bigger allowances.
- EggplantWizard, on 10/11/2007, -2/+1OK, I know this will probably get dugg down, but while the content of the article is interesting, I can't stomach the misuse of the word "Greenback" in this context.
I know it's picking nits, and the submitter meant it idiomatically, but "Both United States Notes and Federal Reserve Notes are parts of the national currency of the United States and both are legal tender. They circulate as money in the same way. However, the issuing authority for them comes from different statutes. United States Notes (like the later Federal Reserve Notes) were fiat currency, in that they were never redeemable explicitly for any precious metal. However, while the United States was on the gold standard, it was possible to redeem them for gold indirectly by exchanging them for a currency of a different obligation, for example a Gold Certificate. Whoever accepted the exchange was left with the less-trusted fiat currency. At the time United States Notes were issued, this was a serious concern, as the government sought to strike a balance between coin shortages and fiat currency." --
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Notes
The major difference is that Greenbacks have been out of use since 1994, and were issued by the Federal Government whereas Federal Reserve notes weren't issued until the early 20th century, and are issued by The Federal Reserve -- a private corporation, consisting of its member banks. - Dotdotdot, on 10/11/2007, -2/+1On diggnation wasn't there something about how if Google changed their default background color from white to black, everyone would save energy?
That would make Google 'greener' also. - ozzum, on 10/11/2007, -1/+0Google also does a lot with solar power - maybe the evil empire could learn from them.
- pronouncable, on 10/11/2007, -3/+1double entendre ftw.
- abhibookmarks, on 10/11/2007, -2/+0Is there anything Google can't do?
- leoncsu, on 10/11/2007, -3/+0TEST
- naio, on 10/11/2007, -8/+2Indeed. Soon all anti-MS whores will begin to turn into anti-Google whores. It WILL happen, just a matter of time.
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