Comments on: Google running Belgian datacenter without chillers

By: Martin Antony Walker

Martin Antony Walker — Thu, 30 Jul 2009 00:49:40 +0000

I was asked by the European Commission to make some provocative remarks to open a session on “ICT Infrastructures for Science: Virtualising Global Research” at the EC event ICT 2008 last November in Lyon, France. One of the remarks was that economies of scale and green economics suggest putting all the IT infrastructure needed to support scientific research in the European Research Area (ERA) in a huge data center in Iceland. This did not go down well with supercomputer center people, some of whom apparently see the advent of cloud computing as an existential threat. They argue that people who fund supercomputers will want to be able to see and touch what is being bought, within their jurisdiction.

Your suggestion for the US is essentially similar. It will be interesting to see how soon this rational way of thinking about provisioning IT for science becomes broadly acceptable.

By: John West

Mon, 27 Jul 2009 05:20:02 +0000

dmr – Most of the government’s many HPC centers aren’t hosting $300M computers; the large ones are hosting $15-$50M computers, with a few outliers, which makes the power bill a much larger fraction of the acquisition price (its not uncommon to talk to directors with $1M power bills and $25M in computers). Under conceivable circumstances the energy landscape could change to make that power bill would be worth managing, either because of changes in the law or changes in the demand structure in that result in the placement of hard caps. Demand shedding to manage load on the local utility and/or minimize cost makes great sense to me as part of a national infrastructure for HPC that produces results in a way that minimizes all the relevant costs to the taxpayer.

And with the right infrastructure, some of which already exists (Evergrid developed some of this stuff in some early demos I saw several years ago) you could indeed dump the state of running jobs out to disk without modifying the application source and transport it. Of course you could do this with a VM today as well, but the claim of the Evergrid folks was that (at the time) their software had less performance impact. Not sure how that has evolved in the intervening couple of years.

I don’t claim it is a simple issue; I do claim that the US government has not put any teeth in its repeated rhetoric calling for management of the country’s computing infrastructure as a national resource. When/if it does decide to get serious about it, then demand shedding across a centrally managed network of computational capacity will be a cost management opportunity worth considering.

By: dmr

dmr — Fri, 24 Jul 2009 20:19:11 +0000

I doubt that the US taxpayer would want us idling a $300,000,000 computer to save $5,000,000 in cooling. It’s not nearly as simple an issue as you make it out to be.

If all (or even most) large-scale HPC applications were as distributable as google’s applications, you might have a point, but (in my experience) they’re not.