Slashdot Log In
Microsoft, Google Battle Over Energy Efficiency
Posted by
kdawson
on Tue Oct 21, 2008 04:45 AM
from the anything-you-can-light-i-can-light-cheaper dept.
from the anything-you-can-light-i-can-light-cheaper dept.
1sockchuck writes "Microsoft and Google have opened a new front in their battle for global domination: data center energy efficiency. Just weeks after Google published data on the extreme efficiency of its previously secret data centers, Microsoft says it has achieved similar results with shipping containers (despite Google's patent) packed with up to 2,500 servers. The geeky benchmark for the battle is Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE), a green data-center metric advanced by The Green Grid. Microsoft says its containers tested at a PUE of 1.22, while Google reported an average PUE of 1.21 for its data centers, which apparently are also now using containers."
Related Stories
[+]
Your Rights Online: Google Patents Shipping-Container Data Centers 207 comments
theodp writes "Two years ago, Robert X. Cringely wrote that Google was experimenting with portable data centers built in standard shipping containers. The idea, Cringely explained, wasn't new and wasn't even Google's, backing up his claim with a link to an Internet-Archive-in-a-Shipping-Container presentation (PDF, dated 11-8-2003) that was reportedly pitched to Larry Page. Google filed for a patent on essentially the same concept on 12-30-2003. And on Tuesday, the USPTO issued the search giant a patent for Modular Data Centers housed in shipping containers, which Google curiously notes facilitate 'rapid and easy relocation to another site depending on changing economic factors'. That's a statement that may make those tax-abating NC officials a tad uneasy."
[+]
Technology: A Look At Google's Newest Data Center 75 comments
miller60 writes "Google doesn't allow the public inside its secret data centers. But a recent groundbreaking event at the company's new South Carolina data center provided glimpses of the exterior of the facility, which shows a design that has evolved since Google's Oregon data center made front page news. A new feature: an open, lighted area resembling a parking deck (containers?). Still missing: moats filled with sharks with friggin' laser beams on their head."
This discussion has been archived.
No new comments can be posted.
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
Full
Abbreviated
Hidden
Loading... please wait.
Containers (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Containers (Score:5, Insightful)
Most businesses care about being green when it means spending less of the green ones.
Parent
Re:Containers (Score:4, Funny)
it takes a container full of servers to run Vista?
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
That's why I'd wish we'd tax the Hell out of the most non-green businesses... gotta make it worth their while somehow.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Joe the plumber can't afford to be green! Most small business owners making under $250,000 can't afford to be green! Won't somebody please think of the small business owners?!
Re:Containers (Score:5, Funny)
You sir, have the economic intelligence of a bullfrog.
Excellent! Bullfrogs are green!
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
> That's why I'd wish we'd tax the Hell out of the most non-green businesses.
It should not be (called a) tax actually: it should not depend on being profitable or not. When said company pollutes, dumps etc. then it should pay for the cleanup. The only shift we need is to realize that clean water, clean air, clean soil etc. is not free.
In Europe they have a "product fee", supposed to cover the safe disposal/reuse etc. of the product at the end of its life. A step in the right direction. I would calcu
Re: (Score:2)
Oh, yeah. McCain is the Microsoft lobby [youtube.com].
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
But would a company want a building full of grubby, dinged, rusty containers? Which they'd have to modify anyway (add access panels for utilities, replace the doors with something more sensible for indoor use).
Re: (Score:2)
Well yes, no sensible company would want a rusting data center.
Re: (Score:2)
Have you ever seen an oceangoing ship? They all turn into USS Rustbucket after a few years.
Housing. (Score:2)
Slap a bit of paint on them; good as new!
A couple of months ago there was a story about a university using shipping containers for student housing [abc.net.au].
Power usage effectiveness isn't the whole story (Score:5, Interesting)
OK so if you have a PUE of 1.2 then five-sixths of the input energy is used to power the computer equipment. But that doesn't say how energy efficient the machines themselves are. You could be running 150W Pentium 4 Extreme Edition processors, or whatever, and still get a higher 'efficiency' than someone using Atom processors giving the same computational speed with lower power usage.
In the old days I would have suggested that Microsoft was limited to x86 processors and so they would necessarily have higher power usage than Google, who would be free to use more power-efficient architectures like ARM or PowerPC. But I get the feeling this isn't true nowadays. In servers and high-end desktops, do Intel x86 chips now offer the best bang per watt?
Re: (Score:2)
No. x86 doesn't offer the best bang per watt. Not on the hight end (IBM, ATI and NVIDIA have some nice offerings here, depending on your needs), or the low end (ARM, MIPS), or anywhere between those.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
True - But it still means that 5/6ths of the power goes to adding computational resources rather than pure-waste overhead.
Re: (Score:2)
In the "Old Days", NT 4.0 had build targets for X86, Alpha, Sparc, and MIPS.
Only recently did they can the other 3 architectures.
Idle data centers? (Score:5, Funny)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Why? (Score:2)
Microsoft, which is currently putting the finishing touches on a huge new data center near Chicago. The bottom floor of the $550 million facility will house at least 150 data center containers packed with servers.
So they put servers in containers, then put the containers in a warehouse? What good does the container do at that point? You're just compartmentalizing the warehouse, with really unwieldy compartments (I'll bet you can't move the containers once installed, so you're stuck with the form factor chosen at installation). Why not install modular walls instead (if it's the compartmentalization that yields the extra efficiency)?
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Fat people... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
This is like two fat people drinking diet coke with their supersized double cheeseburger meal.
indeed! But it is really the guys making the burgers who ought to be audited. I can't see Google/MS having that much of a footprint - the guys that manufacture their servers, drive their containers around the world, etc., I bet, are far more environmentally costly. It would look good if Google/MS's contractors competed not only on price but also PUE. Then I think we'd see some serious savings.
PUE is a rubbish metric for this (Score:5, Interesting)
PUE is a rubbish metric for this. The definition is nothing more than "power at utility meter" / "power used directly by IT kit". There's no account of WHAT that power is doing. Is it running one PC or a thousand? Is it hitting Gigaflops or nanoflops? You could put a laptop without a battery into a datacentre and get a PUE better than someone who has a thousand rackmounts all running at full speed. All PUE measures is the efficiency of the power conversion gear and associated equipment (e.g. UPS, etc.). In fact, UPS is an interesting measure too because the PUE of kit with a UPS would be greatly hindered in PUE stakes even against otherwise identical equipment.
Now, "Total Teraflops / Power at utility meter" - that's a more accurate metric to be comparing. And I'd guess that there Google's containers would wipe the floor with MS's (unless, of course, some trickery is being done in the TFlops measurement - you would have to carefully define what's needed). And even then, throwing a bucket load of low-power ARM processors running Linux into every square inch possible would probably thrash even Google in those stakes (unless they already do that?).
If you're going to have a contest over a metric, at least understand the metric and its shortcomings before you start claiming that X is better than Y.
Teraflops (Score:2)
Total Teraflops - that's a floating-point measurement. Not much floating point done in a database search - apart from the google rating and calculating the search speed pre haps.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
The true energy savings happen at the source. We need to find ways to increase coal-to-electricity efficiency conversion to 90% or higher.
Re: (Score:2)
At 50%, we're already getting pretty near the theoretical limit for combustion processes, iirc. I suspect you're better off finding ways not to use coal (or other fossil fuels) at all.
Re: (Score:2)
What about /useful/ work? If you're running N millions of instructions per second on one watt, but all but one instruction in that is Operating System Overhead.... Microsoft vs Google would report it if they knew how to measure it.
Telling Microsoft that Google are battling? (Score:3, Insightful)
Yep (Score:3, Interesting)
It is a written rule of journalists, they economize the amount of letters in a headline. It makes sense with printed press, but at the web they should follow some different gidelines.
Geography (Score:2)
Since it is mostly irrelevant where a data center physically is, and cooling via electrical power is going to result in a comparable draw to generating the computing cycles in a warm climate, I suspect the greenest thing Google/Microsoft could do would be to site their data centers in the coldest northern climates feasible (rather than, say, California). It makes generated waste heat potentially useful as well, rather than just pumping it straight back out into the atmosphere.
(Thinking about it, Ic
Re:Geography (Score:4, Insightful)
Since it is mostly irrelevant where a data center physically is
Actually I think latency is a major issue for both Microsoft and Google as they chase the market for online applications.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Since it is mostly irrelevant where a data center physically is,
well, "near a high-capacity internet link" is a pretty big issue for datacenters, and AFAIK the main reason datacenters are still being built in stupid places.
What a joke... (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
We are talking about Windows here.
They probably turn a TV on as well while they wait.
Re:What a joke... (Score:4, Informative)
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
My computer has this new green invention called a "switch". It's on the back of the computer, (so you can't hit it accidentally) and you can reduce your computer's power usage to zero while it's not in use, just by toggling the "switch".
What is considered "off" for computers is often what is termed "standby mode" by the green-conscious when referring to any other appliance.
as a recent immigrant, I notice many wall sockets here in the U.K. have a switch right on them, rather than needing to unplug a device t
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
True, but switches on the outlet are pretty much UK-only, as are plugs that include a fuse. Other 230 V-countries don't use them.
you have to include the PSU too (Score:3, Informative)
The PC electronics only burns 1-2 watts in standby, but the large and idle power supply will burn another 8 or so.
Or at least that's the way my imac is. I got a watt meter and it's 70w at full power, 40w in low-power mode, 10w in standby and 10w when off. It only goes to zero when you unplug it.
My laptop is the same: the charger burns 7w even when you don't plug it in to the laptop.
Re: (Score:2)
I think you missed the point. From your very own comment it sounds like what they were saying is that if you have your PC turned off for 16hrs of the day using 1 watt and being able to turn it on and be productive instantly is better than sitting waiting for a couple of minutes using 100s of watts for the system to boot up from full power off before you can be productive. It sounds like what they were saying is effectively that a few minutes of time where you can't do anything at 100 watts is worse than hou
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
A "typical" PC, of which there are none, will likely pull 125-200W at startup. It runs full out, afaik, until power management kicks in. For my laptop, it takes nearly 5 minutes* from power switch to useful (as judged by both disc activity and inability to accept keystrokes in realtime). So 1/12 hr x 125W = 10 watt-hours. That's ten hours in standby if standby is 1W over hibernation/off.
It has a huge benefit to usability, though. Being able to "turn on" the machine and have a working browser over a wireless
Re: (Score:2)
Well, call me insane, but I don't think that some 500kw (how big is the US population?) are a big amount of power for an entire country.
SWaP (Score:2, Informative)
I like Sun's SWaP metric [sun.com] because its value is based on a business operation that you can define.
And as the article mentions, datacentres in a shipping container are like, sooo 2006 [sun.com] .
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
"despite Google's patent" (Score:2, Informative)
You do know that a patent doesn't prevent you from building and using a patented device? You just can't sell them. In fact, making the information available was the reason for patents.
pue?! (Score:2)
director level member and google does not.
disney and enterprise rent-a-car are also members??
what ever happened to kilowatt hours?
"Green Grid" has no Green Organizations as Members (Score:3, Insightful)
The Green Grid: Members List [thegreengrid.org]
Go straight to the source. (Score:2)
The website linked to basically regurgitates material from a Google website about their data centres [google.com] and a blog entry [wordpress.com] by a Microsoft data centre employee.
The original links are more informative than the rehash.