Labrador - A Grid Computing Paradise?
Wired is running an article about the changing nature of big computing. It is no secret to most CTO’s that electricity and cooling are now the single largest costs in running a data center. By some estimates, Google and the other big search providers, for example, use up to 5GW to power and cool the world’s search engines. By my calculations, at 5 cents a kWh (about half what I pay), this adds up to just over two billion dollars per year.
Ask.com operations VP Dayne Sampson estimates that the five leading search companies together have some 2 million servers, each shedding 300 watts of heat annually, a total of 600 megawatts. These are linked to hard drives that dissipate perhaps another gigawatt. Fifty percent again as much power is required to cool this searing heat, for a total of 2.4 gigawatts. With a third of the incoming power already lost to the grid’s inefficiencies, and half of what’s left lost to power supplies, transformers, and converters, the total of electricity consumed by major search engines in 2006 approaches 5 gigawatts.
Wired.com
The second neat fact about today’s data centers is that they are largely run “lights-out“. Managed remotely, it is possible to have almost no hands on management of your physical computing infrastructure. In fact, some say that the less humans in your data center the better, reliability-wise.
Finally, with today’s grid computing infrastructures - something similar to what the big search sites use - it is possible to deploy blocks of redundant processing and disk, replacing them only when a block’s “health” degrades below some predetermined threshold. Take a look at Sun’s BlackBox for an idea of what this might look like.
[...]at least from our internal analysis, the availability of IT infrastructure is inversely correlated to foot traffic. The more people allowed in a datacenter, the more likely they are to kick a cord out of the wall, break something trying to fix it, or just bump into things trying to add value.
Jonathan Schwartz, CEO, Sun Microsystems
When I was a young child, I lived in Churchill Falls, Labrador for five years. It’s in the middle of nowhere and exists only to support a 5.4GW hydroelectric power station. A place like this seems designed for grid computing. You can buy cheap, clean power. It has a virtually unlimited supply of cold clean water for cooling. It is remote, to be sure, but for an installation of sufficient size and redundancy the only thing workers have to do is unload containers of gear and plug them in. The only things it’s missing are fat data pipes to a few major internet connection points. For the kind of money we’re talking about here, that can be remedied.
If I were Danny Williams I’d be on the phone. Newfoundland got screwed the first time they developed Churchill Falls. Maybe they could do better on the second try.
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