An Electricity-Cost-Aware Internet Routing Scheme 88
Al writes "Researchers from MIT, Carnegie Mellon and Akamai have developed a network-routing scheme that could save 'internet-scale' companies such as Google, Amazon and Microsoft million of dollars each year by moving data to locations with the best electricity prices for a particular day. The scheme simply considers both the most efficient routing path for data and the potential cost savings of routing it somewhere farther away. The researchers studied price fluctuations at locations across the country and used data from Akamai caching servers to test the idea out. In the best possible scenario — which would require more efficient servers — they estimate that companies could save as much as 40% on the electricity bills (tens of millions each year). Google already operates at least one datacenter that shuts down when temperatures get too high. Is this the next logical step for internet computing?"
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Why, though, would bulk prices be fixed?
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I think in California, it's a tiered pricing scheme, though that's for residential, as far as I know. FYI: IANAC (I Am Not A Californian)
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Regular homeowners here have fixed electricity prices, or sometimes two prices for peak vs. off-peak usage hours. But, if you are a large enough user to participate directly in the wholesale electricity markets (which a multi-megawatt data center certainly is), not so. Wholesale electricity prices fluctuate on a 5-minute basis in many areas of the country, and there are enormous amounts of money to be saved (or squandered) by timing your consumption well. The big dogs can adjust their usage in response t
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Prior art (Score:5, Informative)
artistic license (Score:3, Interesting)
Better than Ships: Spar Buoys (Score:2)
I picture cruse ships in international waters for online porn and gambling eventually
These guys have a better architecture for what you propose:
http://seasteading.org/ [seasteading.org]
The thing about Cruise ships, is that they are not a good place to keep valuable permanent assets, like your financial data. One Rogue Wave, and they are potentially toast, and all of your secrets are subject to salvage laws in international waters. Not good. But Spar Buoys of sufficient size are immune to all wave action, due to simple geometry -- the part in contact with the water sits vertically, and has a very small cro
New Basis for Economics (Kim Stanley Robinson) (Score:1)
It is the next logical step and I'm glad to see that companies are moving in that direction.
Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars books (Red Mars, Green Mars, Blue Mars) had allusions to a new kind of economic system, partly based on Thermodynamics. The cost of everything was mostly determined by the energy input, including the energy advantage of using natural resources, like metal ores. (There's a whole heaping lot of metal in ordinary soil, but it takes a lot less energy per unit mass to get the stuff out of ores.)
I think you could morph the current economic system into one with a Thermodynamic/Informa
This is just electricty outsourcing. (Score:4, Insightful)
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Well, at the same time that electricity usage shrinks in some areas, lowering prices, it would increase in other, increasing prices.
Who keeps the savings?? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Who keeps the savings?? (Score:5, Insightful)
You just don't get it.
Will the savings be passed on to the customer? Yes because the customer is Google, Microsoft, and maybe Amazon.
What people don't get is that you and I are not Google's, Facebook's, or even Slashdot's customer.
We are their product.
Unless you buy ads on those services you are not their customer.
Amazon is different but I doubt that this will cause a performance hit that you notice or they will not do it. But really folks get a clue. We are Google's customers like a cow is a dairy farmers customer.
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You mean... Google wants my man-milk?
I'm strangely aroused and confused.
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You mean... Google wants my man-milk?
Son, if you are a man-cow, the farmer isn't interested in your milk, he's after your tenderloin. And ribs. And brisket. And tongue.
I'm strangely aroused and confused.
If you are aroused by what would be a fatal situation for you, you are confused.
------
Yes, meat is murder. Tasty, tasty murder.
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Yep I would say that in this persons case he is confused. He wouldn't be a cow so much as a steer.
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Yes you can pick the farmer but your still will be the product and not the customer.
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Sure, Google for one will no doubt be happy to pass along the savings to the majority of their customers. I'm sure they'll pass along the entire 40%.
I'm a pretty typical Google customer, so let's add up the savings. Let's see, I use Google Voice, GMail, Google News, Google Maps / Google Earth, Google Documents, occasionally YouTube and probably a small handful of other services less often. My total bill comes to a whopping $0. $0 minus 40% is $0. See? They've passed along the entire savings.
Heck, mayb
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> They're simply saving themselves money using already available resources in places where the power is cheapest at any given day.
Well, I don't want my packets getting routed through some router in Iceland (and watch my latency/ping go through the roof) just because power is cheaper there.
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From the article:
"The team then devised a routing scheme designed to take advantage of daily and hourly fluctuations in electricity costs across the country. The resulting algorithm weighs up the physical distance needed to route information--because it's more expensive to move data further--against the likely cost savings from reduced energy use. Data collected from nine Akamai servers, covering 24 days of activity, provided a way to test the routing scheme using real-world data."
Your packets will not get
Smoke and Mirrors (Score:3, Insightful)
The end result of these sorts of schemes is that large companies will increase local demand and local electricity prices. The big users will get rebates and concessions, while small users, particularly residential customers, will get hosed.
At the end of the day, once a few large players do this, the benefits will be marginal for them, as electricity costs are mostly driven by peak load.
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That's contrary to the point of the system, which is to route traffic to where electricity is cheapest. If prices go up, the traffic will be routed elsewhere, instantaneously. So if you're in the business of selling electricity, your incentive is to lower prices to attract additional demand when you can handle it.
Economies of scale tend to make things cheaper. I don't see why this would be any different.
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Economies of scale make things cheaper when the suppliers of a commodity have the ability to "scale" -- (ie. produce additional supply to meet demand) The point of this system is to create optimial cost structures for the data center operators -- not the grid as a whole.
The high cost of electricity in many places is a result of peak demand -- the cost to deliver the first 85% of electricity supply is lower than the final 15%.
Why? Power plants are expensive to shut down and startup, so most coal/hydro/nuclea
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I don't get it - why would this screw anyone? If the datacenters have high rates, doesn't that mean that the electric company can't keep up with the peak demand, so they are raising prices? And so if you shift your data elsewhere, reducing the peak demand in that area, doesn't that help everyone, including the electric company?
environmental cost of routing electric power (Score:2)
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Routing packets costs money in terms on bandwidth, which is how you indirectly pay for the router and electricity used to route your packets.
These costs can all be calculated. If I can use this system to save $40,000 on electricity by increasing my bandwidth cost by $10,000, that's a signal that using the system is more efficient than not using it.
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I imagine someone who implements this scheme would make sure the data has already been offloaded BEFORE peak demand.
There are a few points here:
(1) A data center broadcasting its data out to an alternate probably consumes little or no extra power than one that is just serving up web pages, other than the cost of transmission. All of the hard drives and fans are still spinning, you've just got a small incremental cost for the extra network traffic.
(2) Most of this can piggyback on already-existing algorithm
Boy that's dumb. (Score:2)
Electricity costs are something you measure based on tariffs. If you have a load curve of a pattern, one particular place is the best place to be, so you can just move your building there.
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"Electricity costs are something you measure based on tariffs. If you have a load curve of a pattern, one particular place is the best place to be, so you can just move your building there."
Except that very large electricity users can cut their own deal with the power company, and part of that deal can be demand pricing.
Remember how Enron manipulated electricity prices in California? The only reason that worked was that Cali had a very inelastic supply-demand curve - Enron could ask for, and get, very high
Not really (Score:2)
The scenario that you describe tends not to happen because most people that big have industrial agreements with fixed prices for power. I've seen electric bills for guys like steel mills that use up 3MW to well, melt metal with. Or, an oil refinery. Those guys get bills based on a tariff which has a fixed demand price coupled with a fixed price per kw consumed.. so, any spot pricing fluctuations they are insulated from. There are minimum usage requirements that most of these guys meet.
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In the case of Enron, you are confusing ISOs/RTOs with end customers. In the case of California blackouts and manipulation, they didn't do anything wrong. Where they were wrong is they stated they had this big bandwidth business they were building, but they couldn't get it to work, so they just made everything up.
Good for Wind energy (Score:3, Insightful)
This is good for wind energy. Wind energy has the problem that it sometimes doesnt blow, and other times it blows too much ;-)
I have read it is possible to give pretty accurate wind predictions. This could be used to start servers in locations where it blows too much, and stop servers in locations where it doesnt blow.
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This is /.
There are no GFs here.
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This is /.
There are no GFs here.
Even if that is true, it is possible that some people, who use Slashdot, have girlfriends. </pedantic>
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This is good for wind energy. Wind energy has the problem that it sometimes doesnt blow, and other times it blows too much ;-)
Plus, all those turbines will help cool down the servers. Win-win!
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Yes. (Score:1, Redundant)
sounds like a good idea until... (Score:1)
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Hang the latency... (Score:4, Interesting)
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53.3 ms times the speed of light is only about 10 000 miles: not enough for a round trip from Colorado to Australia even if you had a light speed connection going straight through the Earth's mantle.
Google must mirror google.com.au close to you; it's also suspicious that 74.125.91.104 and 74.125.127.100 share the first and second numbers (suggesting that they're physically not too far apart).
Low Datacenter Costs (Score:5, Interesting)
On the subject of data center running costs, why are there not more data centers in Iceland? The cold climate (to minimize cooling costs, which can be 50% of the total power drain in hot climates) combined with cheap renewable geothermal electricity would make it ideal I think.
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why are there not more data centers in Iceland?
Why not Greenland? The climate there is actually colder than Iceland, and it has a more ecologically friendly name.
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How about the North Pole? ;)
Re:Low Datacenter Costs (Score:5, Informative)
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For companies that are latency-sensitive (like Google), it doesn't make sense to serve a lot of traffic out of Iceland (except to Icelanders, perhaps).
Because Belgium is cool enough (Score:2)
Old newss. Google already shift load globally to reduce electricty consumption for cooling and is probably more important than saving a few percent on electrity cost:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/07/16/google_chillerless_data_center/ [theregister.co.uk]
While Belgium is likely to be pretty expensive to live, I bet it's still cheaper than Iceland (though the whole country going titsup during the GFC may change that).
Will they re-route if usage peaks? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Will they re-route if usage peaks? (Score:4, Insightful)
This scenario makes no sense. If a utility is experiencing high loads, they will charge *more*, not less. And the higher the load, the more they'll be charging. This scheme directs data center power consumption *away* from heavily loaded utilities, not towards them.
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In order for Google to use the electricity, they already have to have a datacenter in the location. So they are already "local customers" and are fully capable of of running their datacenter at full capacity.
This isn't some magic way to siphon electricity from grandma's house. All it says is that google will turn off datacenters when the price goes up. This could actually save you from a brownout if Google uses a large percentage of electricity in your locality (doubtful, their usage probably is noise wh
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The "brownout scenarios" assumes that the data centers are a large portion of the overall electrical load, which is unlikely.
Even if they were, causing brownouts in the place where would be counterproductive for Google et. al., so I'd seriously doubt they'd adopt a system where they were taking out their own servers' power source. But that's beside the point; prices aren't low at times of peak usage, so this problem wouldn't exist by definition of the way the system works. This system would help drive tra
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As a couple of the other posts have implied, a Google data center would likely get more expensive when demand is at peak.
Most commercial contracts have a provision for variable rates based on demand, and if they don't these sorts of data centers would be an ideal situation to introduce them. Google, Akamai, whomever could simply come into town and say "we want to build a building somewhere near a local Internet hub". The building would be fed plenty of power when demand is low, and that power could be sol
Dear "outsourcing" naysayers.. (Score:2)
Dear "outsourcing" naysayers..
READ THE SUMMARY. Like, the part where it talks about prices across "the country." As in, the country that the named companies operate in, i.e. the USA.
The Arctic Circle Plan (Score:1)
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Batteries? (Score:1)
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Sure, people and battery companies are looking at this already. Altair Nano [altairnano.com] and A123 [a123systems.com] come to mind. But, utility-scale batteries (a.k.a. a crapload of smaller batteries linked together) like this are very pricey on a per-megawatt basis.
So the question they have to answer is whether the difference in electricity prices between peak hours and off-peak hours is enough to justify the cost of buying and maintaining the batteries. The economics are getting better over time as battery technology improves, but at
Optimization (Score:1)
This is silly. (Score:1)
Sounds great, until (Score:1)
Someone in the Federal government realizes that they can tax all of that savings to increase revenue. They'll accuse these companies of being greedy profit mongers who aren't paying their fair share and tax the fuck out of the savings. They'll be moving data from state to state and the Federal government will have the jurisdiction to get involved.
LK
Shades of rn? (Score:3, Interesting)
The kids these days probably don't remember this bit of text, but it used to be the standard warning before sending a posting out to a network which we talk about in exactly the same way you talk about fight club:
And that was just for sending text messages usually under 4 KB in size.
And now they talk about cost-aware routing?