EDIT:
The article talks about Google's impressive technical achievements. But there's a lot of energy that's wasted in industry. I don't mean "used inefficiently" (although that's bad too); I mean actually wasted.
I used to work at a tiny electronic sub-contracting factory. The morning shift would arrive, turn on the air compressor (2 KW), the reflow ovens (10 KW and 12 KW); and the other machines (about 7 KW).
But they'd do that even if the machines were not going to be running. All these KW were being used for no reason at all. And the machines are pretty inefficient anyway. (One of the owners thought powered machines looked more impressive. Energy costs were included in the rent so there was no incentive to think about when the machines were on or off. )
Counting that waste across all the tiny factories in the world, and including all the waste in offices - it's quite a lot.
Otherwise you are pretty much out of luck - The efficiency of energy extraction from a heat engine is thermodynamiclly limited by the difference between the hot and cold sides. And trying to transport it any significant distance ends up being more trouble than its worth as pumping water gets energy intensive very quickly (and air has terrible heat capacity.)
1-sqrt(294/322) = 4.4%
So, for every 100 watts of heat, you could recover 4.4 watts of power.
but searching briefly just now I can't find any followup beyond the announcement, not clear if it became reality.
Fundamentally, all cooling is the process of transferring heat from one place to another.
Not always the case, but I can assure you that in California, office heating demands are very, very low.
Waste is operating any equipment when not needed, regardless of its internal efficiency.
Another example: Using an incandescent light bulb instead of an LED is inefficient - but leaving either on when not needed is wasteful.
In fact, while much of the content in the article has been written about before, it's still probably 2-3 years or more behind where Google is actually at. I left in 2010 and did't read about anything I had not experienced.
It was pretty funny at the time but the lesson wasn't lost on me: With competition, get ahead, stay ahead, and have things already done and implemented so you can announce big accomplishments when it's strategic for you.
There's a great graph in "Toyota Kata" that shows per-worker productivity of major car companies for the last several decades. They all rise together for the early part of the graph. In the 60s, the American car companies level off; Toyota keeps growing. They focused on continuous improvement, while American car companies floundered.
The really interesting part of this to me is that it's rooted in a philosophical difference. Toyota was started and run by engineers. The American car companies gave birth to the MBA approach to business. Engineers naturally seek improvement; MBAs seek profit.
Google is one of the few major companies with a philosophical background like Toyota's. It's run by nerds. Their goal isn't to increase shareholder value; it's to build great stuff and organize the world's information. Like Toyota, by following their vision, they have generated vast profits and dominated their industry.
What if they just plateaued and didn't really go beyond what you had done when you were there, and this is totally accurate to today?
[1] Platforms is the group at Google that designs and builds the technology that goes into the data-centers.
http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2012/10/ff-inside-googl...
Maybe they don't want you to see inside.
The only data stored there is probably Doodles...
What if Google was tasked with building an orbiting datacenter? How about a Dyson ring, or sphere? How would you do it?
If we were to use all matter in the solar system for commodity linux hardware, how much gmail storage would I get? How many flops? And what sorts of computation could you do on this monster?
Please answer! This should be fun...
First off, building a datacenter in space would not be cheap. It costs around $25,000 to send a kilogram of equipment into a geostationary orbit. [1] So let assume we were to use Dell PowerEdge C1100. Each server costs $14,000 and weights 18kg. [2] This means for each server sent in orbit, you could buy 32 extra ones on Earth.
Then, there is the issue of cooling. Although outer space is really cold, its vacuum prevents the heat generated by the machines from being dissipated quickly. Controlling the temperature of a such datacenter would be a very interesting engineering challenge.
And then how would you power this datacenter? Converting the excess heat back into electricity could be an interesting option. But most likely, it would need a lot of solar panels. This would make the datacenter cheap to run once built, but the upfront costs would be enormous.
And we haven't talked about speed and reliability yet. Since the signal would need to travel about 35,000 km from the geostationary orbit to reach us, communications between Earth and the datacenter would have significant delays. Even at the speed of light, the minimum round trip time would be about 250 milliseconds if we ignore all other possible sources of delay.
The hostile space weather would also make it pretty hard to run servers reliability. Radiations would destroy electronics, caused bit to flip randomly and do all bunch of fun stuff to the equipment.
But... anyhow! Let's assume anyway that by some magical work of science and Google engineering, we figure ways to manufacture a datacenter directly space for almost nothing by mining the Moon, discover some amazing thermoelectric generators with near 100% efficiency and space shields that blocks almost all radiations.
So back our previous example, a high performance PowerEdge gives us up to about 300 GFLOPS of computing power, 192 GB of RAM and 12 TB of storage.
Now if we were to convert the total mass of the Moon (7.34767309 × 10²² kg) into one monstrous datacenter, this would give us about 4.0 × 10²¹ servers. It would gives us a whooping 1.2 billions YottaFLOPS (or put differently, 1.2 × 10³³ FLOPS) of compute madness, 0.8 billions YottaBytes and 49 billions YottaBytes of storage. This monster would consume about the equivalent of 1% of the Sun's total power output.
[1]: http://www.futron.com/upload/wysiwyg/Resources/Whitepapers/S... [2]: http://www.dell.com/us/enterprise/p/poweredge-c1100/pd#TechS...
Some follow up questions: let's assume that we need to move 10^10 yottabytes from the MoonPC to the earth. How do we do it? What's the fastest we could do it without transfering so much heat that it melts either end of the connection?
I wonder why they've mirrored the image (the left side is quite clearly the right side flipped--take a look at the machine identifier labels). What's being hidden?
[1] http://www.google.com/about/datacenters/gallery/#/all/12
You're right -- those PUE numbers from the article were talking about their PUE at the time. Google's 2012 average PUE across all facilities was 1.12/1.13 with a minimum PUE of 1.09/1.10.
Also, Google puts enormous care into the process of calculating PUE since it's kind of black art and if you aren't careful you'll leave out some aspect of your operation that will mislead you into thinking your PUE is lower than it is.
How did Google do this time? Pretty well. Despite the outages in the corporate network, executive chair Eric Schmidt was able to run a scheduled global all-hands meeting. The imaginary demonstrators were placated by imaginary pizza.
How does one decide what will placate imaginary demonstrators? Who calls them off?
Maybe Google really is Sun v2 ("We are the dot in dot-com" == "Where the Internet lives").
http://www.google.com/about/datacenters/gallery/
I thought GWT was designed to "compile" rendered pages for a wide variety of browsers and permutations of configurations?
The pictures are very pretty, but that's really awful of them to release a PR site like this, and force users into using JavaScript.
Unforgivable.
