It’s not easy for news organizations to support investigative journalism in this age of stagnant advertising, shrinking audiences and staff buyouts. So I’m not quite sure what to say to The New York Times for running the story that the Internet runs on electricity.
Thank you?
The Times’s James Glanz spent about a year documenting the not-so-secret existence of huge data centers known as “server farms,” on the premise that many users don’t understand that storing data in the cloud still requires hardware and the power to run it.
I guess just about everyone who cares about how the internet works already knows that information, like the location of their FedEx shipment, the seating plan for an upcoming concert, or the video-on-demand from the season premiere of “Modern Family” the last week. it’s stored in huge, pizza-box-sized computer racks that are connected together to replicate the mainframe computers of yesteryear, except bigger, faster, and cheaper.
Most people probably don’t care, for the same reasons they don’t care about the nuts and bolts of all sorts of infrastructure. They just hope things work out.
Each field of activity has its skills and, without a doubt, there are connoisseurs who can explain and admire the operation of our wastewater treatment plants, switchyards and electrical substations. Trade publications explore these issues in depth. Sunday editions of general circulation newspapers usually don’t. So the first article in Glanz’s multi-part series (apparently once wasn’t enough on the topic of server farms) got me wondering: Is there really a problem here?
Server farms are large and consume a lot of energy. But we live in a 24/7 world, and the Internet is a global business. As the song says, it’s five o’clock somewhere; you can’t just turn off the lights at the end of the workday. Data centers must be designed to meet peak loads and will inevitably find themselves operating well below capacity most of the time, but is this news to anyone?
Articles that lack a lot of news often resort to a lot of hype. This is especially likely to happen if a reporter has spent a year reporting a story that turns out not to be a great story. And so it was with the first article in Glanz’s series, which used figureheads to stir up some buzz.
People are worried about nuclear power, so nuclear power is worth mentioning. “Around the world, digital warehouses use around 30 billion watts of electricity, roughly the equivalent of the output of 30 nuclear power plants, according to estimates from industry experts compiled for The Times.” (1) What about the equivalent output of windmills or solar panels? Would that be better?
In another article in the series, The Times reported that server farms are generally connected to the electrical grid for their daily operations, but require backup power to ensure that servers do not go offline even for a momentary outage. They use battery banks to handle short-term power outages and, in most cases, have diesel generators to deal with longer blackouts. (two)
These generators are generally idle except for testing and when they are brought into service during power failures. That doesn’t seem controversial to me. But The Times found that operators sometimes didn’t get the necessary permissions before installing generators, and in isolated cases, notably an unusual surge in generator use by Microsoft in 2010, generators appear to have run well over time. the expected. That’s a pretty minor thing.
The newspaper also devoted considerable space to the idea that most of the servers in a typical data farm are doing very little work most of the time. That’s true, and it’s inefficient, and probably avoidable in many situations. So the inefficiency of server farms is a good argument, but it’s also inherent in most forms of computing.
If you check the measurement program that is probably installed on your own PC, you will probably find that most of your computing power is being consumed by the “idle process”. The central processing unit is waiting for someone to do something. Your disk drive also spends most of its time spinning lazily, waiting for a program to ask it to read or write some data. Each server in a server farm is a PC that has been stripped down to its basics: a CPU, a disk drive, and a network card, all more powerful than a basic home computer. Servers do not have screens or keyboards. They wait until they are called to serve.
The Times noted that the National Center for Energy Research Scientific Computing was able to run at just over 96 percent utilization in July, or near perfect efficiency, by queuing large jobs and scheduling them so machines rarely have time. of inactivity Should we try this for the Internet? You probably won’t like it if you click the “play” button to watch a Netflix video and the site tells you that your place in the queue means your movie will be ready to watch at 2:43 a.m.
Before it was full of server farms, the electricity-rich Pacific Northwest was full of aluminum plants. When I was in college in Montana, I remember an entire hillside just a few miles away from Glacier National Park that was devoid of trees, next to an aluminum smelter that ran on perfectly clean hydroelectric power. Server farms are still, in general, a cleaner way to create economic value than many of their alternatives.
Of course, if we don’t want server farms here, we can send them to places like India or China. Would you like to have your bank records stored in China? Would you like your email to be subject to the vicissitudes of the Indian power grid? Would you like the energy sources that supply the world’s data to be subject to the clean air standards of developing nations, or would you prefer ours?
The main point of the series is that server farms consume a lot of energy, but how much really? There is a lot of perspective missing. Glanz pointed out that server farms consume more energy than the paper industry, as if the Internet were simply about displacing paper consumption. That leaves a lot of variables out of the equation.
Large data centers may be displacing more power-hungry computers in homes and offices, allowing us to use much more energy-efficient tablets and smartphones. What about the people who can now telecommute thanks to the expansion and speed of data transfer? Many companies, due to telecommuting, can work with less space: less space to heat, less space to cool, less space to light. In addition, employees working remotely contribute to the downward shift in oil use.
For now it seems to be balanced. Per capita energy consumption over the last 20 years has not changed dramatically, despite massive changes in the way we store and move information. We are redirecting our need for power, not increasing it.
My guess is that the Internet, in general, has been both an environmental and an economic boon. I’d be interested in an investigative series that tells me otherwise, but that’s not the series that Glanz and The Times produced.
As with any young, fast-growing industry, efficiency takes a backseat to performance in the initial rush to keep up with demand. Fine tuning for efficiency will come later. Right now, our greatest achievement is creating a world where users can get the data they want and need, wherever they are, whenever they want. Internet plumbing is just as interesting as your average sewage treatment plant, as long as both do the job they’re intended to do.
Sources:
1) The New York Times, “Energy, Pollution and the Internet”
2) The New York Times, “Data Barns in a Farm Town, Power Gobbled and Muscle Flexed”