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A comment on Wind energy used to mine cryptocurrency to fund climate research. Parent comment

Re:Wind energy used to mine cryptocurrency to fund climate r... by allenz on Sunday September 17, 2017 @03:10AM (#15268583)
Both. First, the largest data centers have developed virtualization platforms that are significantly more efficient than vSphere. A major factor is that they provide fine-grained billing for compute, storage, etc instead of selling VMs, which allows them to optimize more effectively. Amazon can provide high-latency Glacier storage or spot instances for spare compute at very low cost.

Second, they optimize physical cooling and power distribution thoroughly. Google has an overhead of just 12%. Here's a good overview of what they do: https://www.google.com/about/datacenters/efficiency/internal...

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Re:Wind energy used to mine cryptocurrency to fund climate r... by hueving on Sunday September 17, 2017 @07:25AM (#15269138)
>First, the largest data centers have developed virtualization platforms that are significantly more efficient than vSphere.

This needs a citation. One of the issues with AWS/etc is that they don't know the usage pattern of a customer that allocates a VM. A well managed vSphere system can be heavily oversubscribed with mostly idle VMs that don't need high performance.

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Re:Wind energy used to mine cryptocurrency to fund climate r... by jononor on Sunday September 17, 2017 @11:30AM (#15270046)
On a PaaS like Heroku where dynos are statefree and short-lived, don't need to allocate CPU/RAM/HDD for a contiously-running VM. And scaling running dynos can be done automatically. We did this based on work to-be-done (message queue length), with scaling decisions taken every 20 seconds. Many parts of system had no dynos running as the default, only when needed.

With a function-as-a-service type computational model like Lambda, it becomes even more fine grained.

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Re:Wind energy used to mine cryptocurrency to fund climate r... by hueving on Tuesday September 19, 2017 @09:32AM (#15284408)
True, but the vast majority of cloud computing is still just VMs.
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Re:Wind energy used to mine cryptocurrency to fund climate r... by jononor on Tuesday September 19, 2017 @09:57AM (#15284606)
Yes, for now. The trend is (and has been) towards more and more elasticity. And since there are economic incentives on both platform provider and buyer side, I believe this will continue. It is somewhat predicated on tooling and programming models continuing to improve alongside. Because for many smaller projects/businesses, compute costs are dwarfed by engineering costs.
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Re:Wind energy used to mine cryptocurrency to fund climate r... by allenz on Wednesday September 20, 2017 @05:51PM (#15298666)
No matter how oversubscribed, VM systems have to supply enough servers to meet peak demand, which means inefficiency during the trough. Amazon's spot billing means that they can approach 100% utilization 24/7.
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