If server farm temperatures were raised by just 5 degrees C, globally, 1.7 million metric tons of CO2 emissions could be avoided at present levels of usage (as well as enough energy saved to power Taiwan for a month). That is about the amount of CO2 sequestered by 43 million trees growing for a decade—or roughly a new Nordic forest covering Scandinavia, according to Intel.
Another step is to change the layout of the microprocessors—each one heating up as it computes—inside a server. They can be arranged so that they are not lined up, which results in each preheating the other, but rather are spaced to allow for cooling airflow.
The architecture of the server buildings themselves can help, too. Facebook's new server farm in Prineville, for example, cools itself completely with the surrounding air, which has itself been cooled through evaporation rather than an air-conditioning chiller employing ozone-destroying and greenhouse-exacerbating chlorofluorocarbons or a cooling tower. And data centers are also learning how to shrink and grow on demand—meaning more or less computers are on at any given time. "Most servers in the U.S. or the world are very underutilized," notes senior engineer Pierre Delforge of the Natural Resources Defense Council, who has been helping to reduce this large source of electricity consumption. Many servers are run at as little as 5 percent of capacity, or 15 to 20 percent at best, while running inefficient software code that, in some cases, was programmed 50 years ago.
It is not just power and money at stake. Data centers employ some 80 billion gallons of water for cooling annually, according to Intel. If the chipmaker can figure out how to operate at temperatures above 40 degrees C, "it gets rid of water," Rego says.
In the end, though, simply building such server farms in places that are naturally cool and renewably powered—think Facebook opening such a warehouse in Luleå, Sweden, with its chilly air and abundant hydropower in 2014—may prove a like-able move. "When you can use cold air or, even better, cold water, you don't have to make cold air or cold water through chillers and therefore save a significant amount of energy," Delforge explains. "Data centers generate a lot of heat." But with energy efficiency and proper siting, maybe all the hot air expressed on Web sites like Facebook can avoid exacerbating global warming.
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28 Comments
Add CommentIf all the hundreds of millions of users of Facebook were doing something else..it might use up MORE energy.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI though Facebook was running on hot air. At any rate it appears the system is trimming it's own sails as people are jumping ship faster then they are climbing aboard.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisOne thing is for sure, if they keep pumping more and more ads the energy use will never go down. The ads must account for at least 90% of the actual bandwidth each user consumes.
I didn't realize that facebook had ads. I turned Adblock Plus off and saw facebook ads for the first time. After turning Adblock Plus on again -- no more ads. It's free.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisDo you really believe that? What do you think funds Facebook? They take your link history and probably even your private information and sell it to every Tom, Dick and Harry that has a dollar. The whole business is running on ad based revenue. Trust me on this, nothing on the internet is free but the BS.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThere is one easy solution, but it's an out of pocket expense they won't like. They need to plant one tree and one solar panel for every server they have. Of course they would never do this unless forced by law to do it. That would result in the industry calling foul and labeling the instigators of the bill as socialists and communists. We are lead to believe that industry has no responsibility to safeguard the environment.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIn my, admittedly limited, experience it's the hard disks that suffer from too high a temperature. I had one fail at work in the early 90s during a heat wave, and had another fail at home after a cooling fan died and I didn't notice till the disk drive started squeaking.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisBut maybe hard disks are hardier now.
My assertion, "it's free," refers to Adblock Plus. It's free of charge and open source. Unfortunately, most of the internet has an underlying profit motive, but there are some exceptions. Wikipedia comes to mind. If you care about freedom on the internet, support projects based on open source and creative commons licenses like Wikipedia, Linux, Mozilla Firefox, Libre Office, Adblock Plus, etc.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisBTW, reducing computer center power & cooling costs is not the fresh idea of environmentalists. Since they are operating expenses, or money sinks, for the corporations and organizations that run them, they have been highly motivated to minimize those costs for decades.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe idea that 'computational' server usage drives electricity usage is mostly unfounded, since the most significant incremental power requirement is moving the data access arms of disk drives to new locations to retrieve or store new data. That's a pretty small percentage of total power and cooling usage.
The person who had the idea that servers are underutilized and could be eliminated must drive to work at midnight, when it might seem to make sense to do away with half of the traffic lanes. As long as there is is no need to handle peak processing requirements, that's a swell idea. Those who paid for all that 'extra' capacity probably feel real silly...
I'm being facetious - much of the hot air generated by this article results from environmentalists explaining to engineers how to design large scale computers...
One of the "Articles You Might Also Like",
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=for-data-centers-informat
states in an image caption:
"Data centers filled with high-powered computing equipment are necessary in today's information-driven society, but the amount of energy required to keep them running chews up as much as 61 billion kilowatt-hours annually in the U.S. alone, representing 1.5 percent of the country's entire electricity consumption."
That means that if we moved all those darned computer centers to Iceland the U.S. could reduce its carbon footprint by up to 1.5%. However, that would increase the cost (including equipment power & cooling) of communications networks in the the U.S., and quite possibly reduce your internet access speeds...
"If you care about freedom on the internet, support projects based on open source and creative commons licenses like Wikipedia, Linux, Mozilla Firefox, Libre Office, Adblock Plus, etc."
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWhile I am all for more open source products, I think you missed the point entirely. The Internet does not run on air or wishful thinking and unless you have service that can run on donations like Wikipedia, someone has to foot the bill. Even Craigslist sells ads.
Mozilla Firefox is certainly not in the free category either. It is competing with Microsoft and Google(among others) that all cater to hundreds of information collectors like Double Click or Alexis.
Linux is open source and was put together by donations and volunteer services, but Red Hat, which is a branded flavor of Linux, makes a healthy profit providing billable services and technical support to thousands of companies in the server business that use that open source software.
Although I don't use Facebook or Adblock Plus and can't watch the stream of ad sites they accesses on the info-bar when the link is opened, you can bet the farm that data use is still sold behind the facade just like MS or Google does. You would really have to be naive to think Facebook would offer a product like Adblock without making money on it. Facebook doesn't really care if you want ads on your page, what they want is to sell information to third party ad promoters so, if for example, you were showing an interest in Fords, you start getting Ford ads on half the pages you visit on the web.
Scientific American is good example of a a site that minimizes this ad-sense stuff to selling their own products for the most part, but look at the bottom of this text dialog. What do you see?
Ultimately you still pay in clicks for even Scientific American Online, even if you don't use any of their other products. Ad costs are tacked onto the price of goods in the corporate world that pays for the ads and that is why we pay double or triple for every branded product in the country. Think about it next time you compare the price of a branded medicine vs a generic product.
That said, even freebees like Firefox have an obligation to conserve as much energy as they can as a moral dilemma.
Unfortunately few corporations have a moral conscience anymore. It is up to consumers to wake up their conscience. Just ask Rush Limbaugh about that. When he shot off his big mouth he lost dozens of good sponsors overnight a few months back.
Yes. When a service is free-to-you, YOU are the product.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisInstead of moving to Sweden they could do what FedEx and many other companies have already done: Install rooftop Solar Power! I guess I shouldn't have been surprised this wasn't even even mentioned in the article and only one commenter (singing flea)did. They seem to be very afraid of clean, renewable and cost effective energy.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thishttp://www.renewableenergyworld.com/rea/news/article/2009/08/fedex-plans-2-4-mw-rooftop-solar-power-system
Yes, I should read read my comments before clicking clicking "Submit"...
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this"You would really have to be naive to think Facebook would offer a product like Adblock without making money on it."
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisAdblock Plus is not a product of facebook. They have nothing to do with each other. Adblock Plus is an add-on for the Firefox and Chrome browsers. When it is enabled, you will never see ads on the internet, ever.
"Scientific American is good example of a a site that minimizes this ad-sense stuff to selling their own products for the most part, but look at the bottom of this text dialog. What do you see?"
I don't see any ads. If you use Adblock Plus, you don't have to either.
Yeah, right at 10-20X the cost of conventional sources of power. A total loser. In Ontario they are paying 40-80 cents per kwh for Solar power, which is not reliable and way off grid demand profile and Japan is paying minimum 52 cents per kwh for Solar and the avg cost of Solar Installs in #1 USA state, California is $7.70 per watt or upwards of $40k per kwavg output. About 10X what Nuclear costs - Nuclear being 24/7, night/day, winter/summer, sunny/cloudy, windy/calm power. And Nuclear can supply ALL OF OUR ENERGY needs, not some piddle-paddle portion.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThat is very interesting (I certainly don't want ads, especially when accessing all those ad server sites really slows down performance), but since most internet content providers' revenues come from selling ads, eliminating them could really muck up the entire internet.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisAs it is, I'm amazed that either 1) anyone actually pays any attention to ads, or 2) ads really offer a return on investment for their sponsors (i.e., increasing their revenues) - the internet's revenue model seems unsustainable.
Either an eventual realization that ads do not reliably increase revenues or the expanded use of ad blockers could eventually doom us all to pay-per-view internet content.
Don't know where you got your numbers, you didn't list any sources, but they're way off. Solar grid parity is already here: http://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/New-Study-Solar-Grid-Parity-Is-Here-Today/
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisNuclear is way too risky and costly:
http://www.ucsusa.org/nuclear_power/nuclear_power_and_global_warming/nuclear-power-projects-risky.html
Unless we get off of these outdated, dirty and radioactive fuel sources we will all be the "losers".
"...Solar grid parity is already here.."
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisBull. That's why Ontario pays 40-80 cents per kwh for Electricity, vs 5-6 cents for new nuclear and ~ 3 cents for Hydro, Gas & Coal. And Japan pays minimum 53 cents per kwh for Solar, typical FITs for Solar. And no wonder why, latest NREL solar installed costs:
https://openpv.nrel.gov/rankings
#1 Solar installs state, sunny California @ $7.87 per watt. That's @ excellent 16% CF that's $48k/kwavg. And that is assuming perfectly aligned roof, panels cleaned fastidiously at least weekly, no shade trees or buildings, no breakdowns, and not counting degeneration. And not counting the added very high Grid costs of the Solar. So 10X the cost of new First-of-a-kind Nuclear.
And EIA, puts levelized cost of new Solar for 2016 at 21 cents per kwh, giving it an EXTRAORDINARILY high CF of 25%, well above real world values, and ignore the high variable O&M cost for Solar. And ignores the high Grid costs of Solar. And it puts the levelized cost of new Nuclear, GenIII, FOAK plants at 11 cents per kwh.
www.energytransition.msu.edu/documents/ipu_eia_electricity_generation_estimates_2011.pdf
And your UCS link, from the paid-by-Oil, rabidly anti-nuclear Union of Concerned non-Scientists ( a fellow enrolled his cat as a UCS member) is just pure BS.
And nuclear is the cleanest source of energy, contrary to your invented assertion, the only serious energy source that contains its wastes.
Deaths per TWh of energy:
Coal: 161
Oil: 36
Biomass: 12
NG: 4
Hydro: 1.4
Wind: 0.15
Nuclear: 0.04
nextbigfuture.com/2012/02/how-many-lives-does-coal-and-oil-have.html
"And nuclear is the cleanest source of energy, contrary to your invented assertion, the only serious energy source that contains its wastes."
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisHa! Tell that to the residents of Fukushima.
I will tell it to them, as others - the world's foremost experts in Radiation Health Physics are telling them. But your Big Oil financed ENGO's and Mainstream Media try to drown out Voices-of-Reason with a massive, money-no-object, Fear Mongering campaign. No mention of their giant raging inferno at the Chiba Oil Refinery, which released thousands of tons of the most deadly carcinogens known to man into the air, water and land. Every citizen in Japan is eating, drinking and breathing those deadly carcinogens as we speak.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisatomicinsights.com/wp-content/uploads/Cuttler-2012_ANS-President-Session_Jun23-copy.pdf
Here's what the world's foremost experts on Radiation Safety are really saying:
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisChernobyl Radiation Killed Nearly One Million People: New Book
http://www.ens-newswire.com/ens/apr2010/2010-04-26-01.html
I agree that Big Oil is very destructive, but that doesn't somehow make Big Nuclear good.
That schlock Greenpeace special of yours by one Alexi Yablokov who is some sort of ancient cetacean biologist who got grandfathered into the Russian Academy and has ZERO qualifications in Radiation Health Physics. His report is transformed into overpriced arse-wipe by this report by a REAL Russian Radiation Health Physicist, M.I.Balonov :
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisatomicinsights.com/2011/10/devastating-review-of-yablokovs-chernobyl-consequences-of-the-catastrophe-for-people-and-the-environment.html
"...Prof. Yablokov and his coauthors give extensive references to the media, commercial publications, websites of public organizations, or even unidentified ones, to justify their ideas. These are also the source for statistical data on demography, morbidity, etc., which is not considered seriously by the scientific community. Most of the references are conference proceedings, abstracts of theses, and brochures in Russian, all hitherto unknown to the world and hardly accessible even in the former Soviet Union, not to mention the rest of the world. Thus, independent verification or clarification of the data presented by the authors is virtually impossible..."
"...the author proposes so-called ecological or geographic technologies,... are compared. However, international experience in radiation epidemiology has repeatedly demonstrated that this approach leads to erroneous conclusion..."
Reputable analysis of the Chernobyl incident by ACTUAL Radiation Health Scientists:
http://probeinternational.org/library/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/Observations-on-Chernobyl-21st-Century-1.pdf
http://www.who.int/ionizing_radiation/chernobyl/who_chernobyl_report_2006.pdf
In the most accurate report on the Chernobyl incident, 31 died. There is zero evidence of any further deaths. See:
http://www.21stcenturysciencetech.com/2006_articles/spring%202006/Chernobyl_Folly.pdf
"...the mortality rate among these 103 survivors was 1.08 percent per year... less than the average mortality rate in the three affected countries, which was 1.5 percent in 2000..."
Actually it's the most accurate and credible study to date.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this"The authors examined more than 5,000 published articles and studies, most written in Slavic languages and never before available in English."
The authors said, "For the past 23 years, it has been clear that there is a danger greater than nuclear weapons concealed within nuclear power. Emissions from this one reactor exceeded a hundred-fold the radioactive contamination of the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki."
The sources you site are paid by the nuclear industry and are therefore heavily biased.
So greenpeacer rknight101 is all sooky because they wasted all those Oil dollars funding another anti-nuclear rant that every reputable analysis has trashed as a piece of garbage. Greenpeace has to sunk to the bottom of the barrel recruiting a whack of known Soviet kookballs to provide the "5000 published articles", the same Soviet era bureaucrats who caused the Chernobyl explosion. Notice even Russian radiation health physicists have shown them to be the equivalent of the white paper I just used to wipe my butt with.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisFunny how Greenpeace runs to old Soviet sources to try to trash Nuclear energy from the same SCHLOCK'S WHO CAUSED THE CHERNOBYL incident. That's just like the Greenpeace hypocrites, were in a dilemma because a couple of their No-Nukes adventurers were stuck in the Arctic, so they had to rescue them with a Russian Nuclear powered ice-breaker. Greenpeace Wind Powered sailing ship was up to the task.
And every source I gave were REPUTABLE, RESPECTED International Radiation Health Physicists, including the World Health Organization, while you didn't even have ONE not even ONE reputable scientist. And not one of the references I provided was funded by the "nuclear industry" as you claim. Whereas your study was ENTIRELY FUNDED by the RABIDLY ANTI-NUCLEAR, paid-by-Oil Greenpeace mega-bucks organization. Greenpeace just doubled their unelected board of directors to 12, all with six figure salaries, the paid-by-Oil ENGO business is booming while ordinary people are suffering.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisOh yea, the Big Nuke industry would never spend millions to bribe Politicians, Academia, private front groups and people who troll the internet to propagandize the public and get huge Government Subsidizes (without which they could Not survive).
Except they do:
http://irw.s3.amazonaws.com/images/resized_legacy/nuke_main_12_11_09_631px.jpg
How about using the heat generated to heat homes especially in cold places liken Sweden
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisSorry to return the discussion to the Scientific American article, butt . . .
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe reason why Facebook can operate without chillers or cooling towers is the dry location they have chosen. Data in the 2009 ASHRAE Handbook, Fundamentals indicates that the 0.4% design values at Redmond, 25km from Prineville, are 17.7°C wet bulb with a mean coincident dry bulb of 31.4°C. We don't know how efficient their evaporative cooling system is but if it was 95%, air could be supplied under these conditions at 31.4 - (31.4 - 17.7) * 0.95 = 18.4°C. The trick is the location. Had the data center been in Los Angeles the design temperatures would have been 21.2°C and 25.6°C respectively and the supply air temperature 21.4°C and not cold enough to do the job.
We also don't know what temperature the system operates at, but my bet is that to take advantage of the relatively high supply air temperature they will be running at say 25°C.
Of course, this is a PR exercise so we are not being told the whole story. Evaporative cooling requires moving huge amounts of air and that in turn uses huge amounts of energy in fans. Although chillers may have big motors, fans run all the time and so typically use 30 to 40% of the energy in conventional cooling systems.
Also missing is the requirement for humidification since data centers normally need to run at above 40% relative humidity to prevent static electricity destroying electronics. For the very dry climate of Prineville, this is also going to require a lot of energy since humidifiers are essentially boilers.
Finally, all that evaporative cooling and humidification demands lots of water, comparable to the amount of water used in cooling towers.
Overall it sounds like a successful innovation but step one is to pick the right location – and it doesn't need to be Iceland.
You are absolutely right... People should make sense of real usage for facebook, instead of sending dull messages about almost any thing
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThey should go to cool places like Iceland. Iceland has plenty of renewable energy on to cool down you just open a window.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this