Comments on: Power could cost more than servers, Google warns

Computer equipment power consumption could "spiral out of control," affecting affordability of computing, Google engineer says.

[vchmielewski]

Apple switch

The power per watt issue is one of the primary motivations for
Apple's switch from the PowerPC chip to Intel. It's extremely
important for laptops and servers where heat management is a
concern.

[Christopher Hall]

The solution is simple, Google

Really it is. And maybe you could throw your googles of dollars at it:

Invent fusion.

:)

[Rod Adams]

Why bother with fusion when fission is easy and cheap

The smiley in your post indicates, that you were, of course,
joking, but I take such comments pretty seriously.

Nuclear fission is readily available, works like a champ and has a
long way to go before its technical limits have even been
explored, much less achieved.

Fusion is a pipe dream that consumes massive quantities of
money, talent and time.

I wrote an article on the subject several months ago - Fusion
versus Fission: Difficult versus Easy. If you are interested, you
can find it at:

http://www.atomicinsights.com/AI_03-04-05.html

[Lolo Gecko]

yikes! the sky is falling ...

:)

[drhamad]

I'm shocked - a company copies the Apple line *gasp*

Gee, that never happens ;)

[mendozamanny]

One solution could be the 80plus.org

This year we have been offering a way to save energy simply by replacing your computers power supply and get paid to do it. Visit jameco.com or 80plus.org for more information

[sanenazok]

definite no

If the best they can do is promise you "up to $30 in savings for the life of a PC" then it's not worth the cost/hassle of replacing a power supply. Try again.

[pworth]

hmmmmmmm!

I kind of understood the passage, basically Google is screwed unless it can reduce its overall power usage of its servers, or it converts to servers that get better gas mileage? So does anyone else see trends or importance shifting? I'm asking because I still want to have a job in tech 20 years from now...:0

[uwiger]

concurrency isn't that hard

It is not true that concurrency forces people
to think in ways that are unnatural.

Conventional programming languages approach
concurrency in a way that is unintuitive, but
that's a completely different story.

Erlang (http://www.erlang.org) has been used for
over a decade in commercial products with lots of
concurrency, and we have lots of evidence that
the programming model is both intuitive and safe,
in fact more so that object-oriented design.

We are eagerly awaiting multi-core chips, as they
offer us a perfectly natural way to scale up the
capacity of our products.

Ulf Wiger
Senior Software Architect
Ericsson AB

Re: concurrency isn't that hard

concurrency at the software level is emulated and therefore easier

however, at the hardware level it might be a little pain in the...

again, security and concurrency don't like each other (problems with serialization, syncronization, memory cloning, etc)

[grant999]

You are ignoring half the issue

Yes, servers/processors have to become more energy efficient in order to keep the cost of performance reasonable, but energy itself is the other half of the equation that must be addressed. There is too little investment in renewable energy sources (especially solar power) that have the potential to be cheaper than what is currently used (not to mention safer, environmentally cleaner, and more stable than relying on sources that use fossil fuels). If Google and other companies were so worried about this issue, they'd also be looking into where their energy comes from and how to improve that side of the equation.

[Sonicsands]

reduction is better than reuse

For the environment, less consumption is far superior than improving energy supply. This is true in all situations.

[Eskiegirl302]

POWER!

GEEZ! POWER PLANTS ARE BUILT, MAINTAINED, USED, ALL OVER THE WORLD. WHAT IS WRONG WITH GOOGLE MAKING THEIR OWN POWER SUPPLY? THEY SEEM TO BE ABLE TO DO EVERYTHING ELSE. IT IS NOT LIKE THEY CANNOT AFFORD IT. THEY DON'T HAVE TO RELY ON THE POWER PLANT THAT SUPPLIES THEM. THEY CAN BUILD THEIR OWN. AND THEY CAN DO IT WISER, BETTER, MORE COST EFFICIENT, QUICKER, AND SO FAR FROM EVERYONE ELSES TECHNOLOGY, THEY WONT HAVE TO WORRY EVER ABOUT SOMEONE ELSES POWER.

ESK

[yehweh247]

HAHAHHA .. LAMO!

YOU ARE FUNNY SERIOUSLY ... THE WHOLE THING ABOUT A SEARCH COMPANY THAT DOES MAPS, BLOGS, MAIL AMONG OTHER THINGS TO BUILD THEIR OWN POWER PLANTS! THATS JUST funny (Me so stupid! Me think double caps displays bigger text)

[popcornut]

Upgrading Hardware

Is this what they are talking about when they say the Government needs to pas laws to upgrade hardware? Are cell phones the only thing involved or do computers benifit by the government getting the lead out?

[bdennis410]

Power as money?

Years ago I speculated that any future wars would be fought over oil, because oil delivers power and power runs the world, particularly in computing. No electricty, no calculations, no "computing."
While I still believe that, I wonder if in parallel we don't develop a "New money," one based on BTUs (British Thermal Units - a method of detemining heat values of cumbustion sources).
If that happened, might we then start pricing computers on BTUs consumed/expended say, per Million Calculations Per Second? Would "computing economics" then force us all to have supercomputers for personal use, to justify the power expenditure? Or would "shared computing" a rapid growth area now called "outsourcing" or "co-location" computing on more efficient, much larger systems serving many customers at one time, become much more prevalent?
I just wonder.

[dyoger]

different investment vector?

Maybe it's time for google to put their money where their mouth is, and start investing in alternative power generation, non-centralized and uncontrolled by megacorps/western governments.

[dyoger]

and about those processors...

I'd also suggest google buy the first half a million cell processors from Sony, a la Apple purchasing large quantities of the critical components for their mp3 products, which helps guarantee high prices.

God bless capitalism!

[jmmejzz]

Why is this news?

Over the life of a product, initial investment is always a diminishing percentage of TCO. The longer the life the higher percentage of maintaining the equipment energy and support. It is a question of value not cost, however reducing the cost of any part of the equation is a good thing but this article is the equivalent of the line from "Casablanca": "I'm shocked there is gambling going on here."

[Chung Leong]

The outlook is grim

If power consumption grows at 50 percent per year, in 25 years the average computer would require well over 1 megawatts of electricity. Perhaps we should start putting more R&D money into developing personal nuclear generators?

With compound growth, you can make all kinds of silly prediction sound pausible.

[Rod Adams]

Personal Nuclear Generators

Chung:

I recognize that you may have been trying to be funny, but
Adams Atomic Engines, Inc. (www.atomicengines.com) has spent
the past ten years working on designing atomic engines and
generators that come far closer to the "personal nuclear
generator" than you might imagine.

We certainly believe that our machines will be well suited for
powering server farms and other moderately sized, important
loads.

Our first machines will probably be 10 MW (electric) generators.
A couple of machines that size could provide reliable power to a
small city, a college campus, or a technology park.

[System Tyrant]

The cost of competition.

This is one of the cost of competition. When you have companies working hard to get out the top performer they sacrifice power consumption.

I suppose the ideal solution is stop buying performance and start buying by power consumption. My only thought there is nobody is going to do that.

[brendlerjg]

Double that Cost Estimate

Let's not forget that effectively all of the power into a system is converted into heat, which must be removed. At home, this my reduce your winter heating bill. However, much of the actual cost of any data center is electricity used to cool it, which is effectively equal to the electricity used to otherwise power it. So, unless these estimates already factored cooling into the cost (which they may have, if they are good TCO estimates) then double them.

[dr_no]

Uh, is that like PRINTERS?

How does it go again? Buy 1 printer for $100 and spend $400 on ink for the lifetime of the printer?

The cost of power is one of the operating costs, but if you can't include that cost in your revenue mode;, you shouldn't be in business.

I've done power calculations for a 1000 PC array, and the cost was little more than having one extra specialist employee.

We'd all like to run things cheaply, so maybe now's the time to be looking at energy recovery, recycling and sources.

Google just cash in some stock and bingo!

Come on Google, who needs to worry about power when you guys can cash in a few million shares and have money for decades.

Duh!

So? Just move Google to Idaho

or some other place with cheap hydro-electricity.

[kahalb]

Super Scalar = Multiple Threads? No

Which is better: a superscalar processor that executes up to 8 instructions per cycle, or Niagara with 8 cores, that processes up to 8 instructions per CPU cycle? Sounds the same?

Not if the Niagara instructions are 8 unique programs (threads), all in some 'state' of waiting on memory, in Thread queues.

On 2 core superscaler chip, 16 instuctions per cycle cycle, and 4 core 32 instructions per cycle. Or 8 core Sun with 8 instructions?

It's amazing how quickly we forget about SuperScalar Architectures that can leverage 8 processing units per CPU cycle: Load, Branch, Integer Operation, Floating Point Operation. On one chip. Now Sun Niagara has developed a Non-Superscalar chip that each Core only does one instruction/cycle, but has 8 of them. Rather than 1 processor that can do 8 instructions per cycle. Which would you rather manage to get added through-put: 8 unique instances, or 1?
To get worthwhile jbb results Niagara run 4 JVMs, versus one on SuperScalar chips. Do you want to run 4 instances of your Java application to get the scaling you can with one?

And at what cost? Is Niagara actually cheaper to buy and own than other 8 core solutions?

And since when is doing less work, with less power a novel idea? We can all run on 286s with today's fabs and use a fraction of the power...or simplied 1994 US2 technology to develop a new programming model.