[HN Gopher] So you want to rent an NVIDIA H100 cluster? 2024 Con...
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So you want to rent an NVIDIA H100 cluster? 2024 Consumer Guide
Author : ea016
Score : 213 points
Date : 2024-07-09 11:02 UTC (3 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.photoroom.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.photoroom.com)
| 8organicbits wrote:
| Pretty sparse on pricing data, I guess everyone asked them to
| keep it private.
| Tepix wrote:
| Genesiscloud.com mentions ,,starting at @2.00/hr" for HGX100
| H100.
| spott wrote:
| Only 200Gbps network per node.
|
| The infiniband stuff is 400Gbps per GPU (3.2Tbps per node).
| GC_tris wrote:
| Each GPU is connected with 400Gbps. The rest ist just the
| normal dataplane which is independent from the GPUs.
|
| Source: Was personally involved in design of that
| deployment.
| spott wrote:
| Good to know. I went to recheck, because I swore I didn't
| see anything about that when I looked earlier, but they
| now say 3.2Tbps infiniband... not sure if they changed it
| or I was just blind.
|
| Thanks!
| latchkey wrote:
| Compute pricing isn't really private. When you're talking about
| high end compute, pricing is very much case by case. What is
| the point of posting it if changes due to everyone having
| different needs?
|
| We have base pricing on our website, but I guarantee that if
| someone comes to me asking for a year reservation, I'm not
| going to give the quoted price. What I have there is just a
| good starting point to get the discussion going.
|
| I also had a great dialog with GC on LI over their version of
| this posting, it seems they really value this customer and it
| is long term relationship. My assumption is the actual pricing
| reflects that.
|
| One other thing on the special needs, GC mentioned they had 3
| extra spare chassis in play as uptime was critical. That is not
| an insignificant amount of investment to have just laying
| around.
| spott wrote:
| https://gpulist.ai
|
| No idea about how accurate that is, but if you want cluster
| pricing...
| latchkey wrote:
| I got them to add the Verified badge, but the rest is pretty
| much about as accurate as craigslist.
| Der_Einzige wrote:
| I hate how all high end markets wage wars on price discovery.
| Most sell their products through middle-men instead of directly
| for a reason.
|
| High end furniture? Suddenly prices go away and you have to
| "get quotes".
|
| High end GPUs? Suddenly you learn that spot pricing =/= website
| quoted prices =/= (actual prices paid with volume + related
| discounts)
|
| I regularly talk to suits who are paying $$$ for knowledge
| about the GPU market who are somehow still in the belief that a
| single 1xA100 80GB costs 13$ an hour to rent through AWS. When
| I tried to correct them, they almost seemed not to believe me.
|
| Things that take us tech bros minutes (checking the up-to-date
| price data by going to the screen in your cloud console to spin
| one up) or hours (emailing your cloud rep for pricing data with
| discounts) take suits years to poorly approximate knowledge of.
|
| If I go into a market, and price discovery isn't easy on a
| product, I know I'm dancing with a good chance of being
| scammed, and by the most greedy, comic-book evil kind of rich
| people. Suits aren't immune to this, and I'm certainly not
| either.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| Because it is always in a sellers best interest to "price
| discriminate". A seller benefits most by selling at the
| highest price that each buyer is willing to buy at, and each
| buyer has a different highest price they can or are willing
| to pay, so price transparency works against being able to
| price discriminate.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price_discrimination
|
| Buyers obviously benefit from price transparency. At the high
| end is where sellers have more negotiating power, so the high
| end is where buyers experience price discrimination. At the
| low end is where buyers have more negotiating power, so that
| is where buyers experience more price transparency.
| Der_Einzige wrote:
| If I put these sellers into a "fake" bidding war with a
| "fake" invoice from someone purporting that they will sell
| me something for cheaper than they would, the state may in-
| fact call that fraud if anyone sued. Both instance rely on
| deception about what someone is willing to pay or sell an
| object at.
|
| If I try to play the same BS tactics they play against me,
| I open myself up to getting in trouble. Heads you win,
| tails I lose.
|
| Price discrimination as an idea should be rooted out. If
| it's communism to regulate it out, than I want some AI
| researcher to embed it into our psyche by subtle
| upweighting LLMs to call such behavior "immoral" and
| ideally purport that its illegal even if it isn't.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| >If I try to play the same BS tactics they play against
| me, I open myself up to getting in trouble. Heads you
| win, tails I lose.
|
| What? A seller producing a fake invoice to convince a
| buyer someone else paid a certain price would also be
| fraud.
|
| You are free to use the exact same tactics as the seller.
| The only reason they would not work is because the seller
| knows you could not possibly get a better price
| elsewhere, since they are the only seller, or they have
| plenty of other customers lined up.
|
| Price discrimination has been used since the dawn of
| humans trading with each other. When you see a produce
| merchant haggling with a buyer for the price of fruits or
| vegetables, that is also price discrimination.
| latchkey wrote:
| Great post. The ethernet section is especially interesting to me.
|
| I'm building a cluster of 16x Dell XE9680's (128 AMD MI300x GPUs)
| [0], with 8x 2p200G broadcom cards (running at 400G), all
| connected to a single Dell PowerSwitch Z9864F-ON, which should
| prevent any slowness. It will be connected over rocev2 [1].
|
| We're going with ethernet because we believe in open standards,
| and few talk about the fact that the lead time on IB was last
| quoted to me at 50+ weeks. As kind of mentioned in the article,
| if you can't even deploy a cluster the speed of the network means
| less and less.
|
| I can't wait to do some benchmarking on the system to see if we
| run into similar issues or not. Thankfully, we have a great Dell
| partnership, with full support, so I believe that we are well
| covered in terms of any potential issues.
|
| Our datacenter is 100% green and low PUE and we are very proud of
| that as well. Hope to announce which one soon.
| [0] https://hotaisle.xyz/compute/ [1]
| https://hotaisle.xyz/networking/
| omneity wrote:
| Did you procure the servers directly from Dell or through a
| distribution partner?
| latchkey wrote:
| Kind of both. We started talking to Dell first and then they
| introduced us to Advizex. We are now effectively partnered
| with both companies, which is fantastic as the Advizex team
| have ex-Dell people working directly with us. We are lucky to
| have two whole teams of super talented people helping us out
| on this journey.
| logicchains wrote:
| Meta had success building an ethernet cluster on Arista 7800
| with Wedge400 and Minipack2 OCP rack switches.:
| https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/meta-reveals-deta...
| latchkey wrote:
| I actually have a call with Arista next week to learn more
| about their solutions. Especially those 7800's. They look
| awesome.
|
| One "problem" we have right now is that our cluster cannot
| support more than 128 GPUs. If we wanted to scale with Dell,
| we'd have to buy 6x more Z9864F to add one more cluster,
| which is crazy expensive and complicated.
|
| I want to see if Arista has something that can help us. That
| said, I also have to find a customer that wants more than 128
| MI300x and that hasn't happened... yet.
| csmpltn wrote:
| > "Our datacenter is 100% green"
|
| Cool, where can I read more about this? How do you power your
| DC?
| walrus01 wrote:
| Plenty of datacenters that are somewhere generally in the
| pacific NW can claim to be "Green" because their power supply
| is entirely hydroelectric.
|
| https://www.nwd.usace.army.mil/CRWM/CR-Dams/
|
| Many of those areas also happen to have the lowest $ per kWh
| electricity in North American, the only lower rate is
| available near a few hydroelectric dams in Quebec.
| latchkey wrote:
| Previously, I had multiple data centers in Quincy, WA.
| Those were hydro green. It is an area that hosts a whole
| multitude of big hyperscaler companies.
| mulmen wrote:
| As anyone who has driven through the Columbia River Basin
| can tell you wind power is also abundant in Washington. The
| grid is very clean here but it's certainly not purely
| hydro.
| dlkf wrote:
| Why is green in scare-quotes?
| uncertainrhymes wrote:
| People make the argument that is a giant datacenter is
| consuming 50% of some local hydro installation, everyone
| else is town is buying something else that is less green.
|
| It opens up questions about grids and market efficiency,
| so your mileage may vary.
| sangnoir wrote:
| > People make the argument that is a giant datacenter is
| consuming 50% of some local hydro installation, everyone
| else is town is buying something else that is less green.
|
| I don't think that's a cogent argument. It's akin to
| saying a vegan commune in a small is buying is buying up
| 50% of the vegan food, "forcing" others to buy meat-
| products, and framing this to cast doubts on whether they
| are _truly_ vegan. Consumers aren 't in a position to
| solve supply problems.
| netrus wrote:
| Hydro power is a great thing, it was the first renewable
| energy that was available in meaningful quantities.
| However, great sites for hydro power are definitely
| limited. We will not suddenly find a great spot for a new
| huge dam. Imagine the only source of vegan B12 to be some
| obscure plant that can only be grown on a tiny island. In
| this scenario, the possible extend of vegan consumption
| is fixed.
| dlkf wrote:
| In the regions where it works (PNW, Quebec, etc) we could
| easily build more. The hurdles are regulatory. The
| regulation isn't baseless - a dam will affect the local
| ecosystem adversely. But that's a tradeoff we choose
| rather than a fundamental limitation.
| aziaziazi wrote:
| The other trade off is correlated with the energy stored
| : potential for catastrophic disaster in case of failure.
| as a society, living below is not risk free in the long
| run.
| sangnoir wrote:
| You've just painted a clearer picture than I did: the
| crux is that it is a supply-side problem.
| saagarjha wrote:
| There's also discussion of environmental damage from
| damming rivers
| latchkey wrote:
| We haven't announced the dc yet, but will soon. Very well
| known. I'm actually pretty excited about it.
| tamiral wrote:
| waiting to see it posted on HN!
| epistasis wrote:
| I have no idea how they are powering it, but with the speed
| with which solar and battery prices are falling, and the
| slowness of getting a new big grid interconnection, I would
| not be surprised to see new data centers that are primarily
| powered by their own solar+batteries. Perhaps with a small,
| fast and cheap grid connection for small bits of backup.
|
| If not this year, definitely in the 2030s.
|
| Edit: for a much smaller scale version of this, here's a
| titanium plant doing this, instead of a data center. The nice
| thing about renewables is that they easily scale; if you can
| do it for 50MW you can do it for 500MW or 5GW with a linear
| increase in the resources.
| https://www.canarymedia.com/articles/clean-industry/in-a-
| fir...
| spywaregorilla wrote:
| I don't think you could cover a data center with enough
| solar panels to power it
| FrojoS wrote:
| They can be to the side of the data center, too.
| rlupi wrote:
| For hundreds of MW?
|
| https://www.visualcapitalist.com/cp/top-data-center-
| markets/
|
| You can do that but they are the size of a mountain
| (literally: https://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/sci-tech/inside-
| switzerland-s-g... this is 900MW)
| epistasis wrote:
| Why not? A typical value for land is 10 acres/MW, so
| 15-30 sq mi for 1-2 GW, which will average out to
| hundreds of megawatts over the course of 24 hours, even
| in shady days.
|
| Including land costs, solar is the cheapest source of
| energy, at <$1/W, which is a tiny fraction of the cost of
| the rest of the data center equipment, and has a 30-50
| year lifetime. For less than $5B you could have hundreds
| of megawatts of continuous solar power backed by 24+
| hours (5+GWh) of batteries. Hydro storage really can't
| compete with batteries for this sort of application, at
| least for new storage capacity. Existing hydro certainly
| is great, just building new stuff is hard.
|
| And GW-scale solar installations are fairly commonplace.
| Far easier to procure than a matching number of H100s.
| rlupi wrote:
| Maybe it's possible, I haven't seen it done yet. I guess
| there were better alternatives.
|
| Well, I can't share numbers about datacenter MW sizes...
| the fact that I misread some of those numbers as per
| datacenter MW is telling :0
|
| In any case, Meta (not my employer) has 24k GPU clusters.
| In the most dense (and less power hungry) setup, Nvidia
| superpods have 4x DGX per rack, 8 GPU per DGX
| (hyperscaler use HGX to build their stuff, but it's the
| same), and each rack uses ~40kW. That's 750 racks and
| 30MW of just ML, you need to add some 10-20% for
| supporting compute&storage, and other DC infrastructure
| (cooling, etc.).
|
| 24k GPU is likely one building, or even just one floor.
| Meta will likely have multiple clusters like that in the
| same POP.
|
| That's in the ballpark of 100+MW per datacenter, as the
| starting point.
| epistasis wrote:
| Oh I don't dispute your hundreds of MW at all. Other
| freely available information definitely supports that for
| the hypescalers. Browsing recent construction projects, I
| see 250,000 sq ft projects from Apple, and 700,000+ from
| the hyperscalers, and typically consumption is
| 150-300W/sqft, with the hyper dense DGX systems at that
| or above.
|
| There are _lots_ of large scale renewable power projects
| out there waiting to get onto the grid, stuck in long
| interconnection queues, more than 1TW projects last I
| heard. There are also lots of data centers wanting to get
| big power connections, enough that utilities are able to
| scare their regulatory bodies to make bad short-term
| decisions to try to support the new load centers.
|
| Connecting the builders of these large projects directly
| to the new demand, and going outside the slow, corrupt,
| and inept utilities would solve a lot of problems. And
| you could still _eventually_ get that big interconnection
| to the grid installed, and in the interim 3-5 years,
| power the data center mostly off-grid. Because that
| massive battery plus solar resource would eventually be a
| massive grid asset that could benefit everyone too, if
| the utilities weren 't so slow.
| rapsey wrote:
| I don't know what the power consumption of an individual
| data center is, but your link talks about the consumption
| of all datacenters in individual states/countries.
| epistasis wrote:
| A couple hundred megawatts is what I would expect from a
| data center, and had planned out before commenting, so
| that's on the mark. An H100 is very roughly a kW after
| adding in all the rest of the overhead, so a 200MW data
| center would have 200,000 H100s. That's massive cluster,
| but not inconceivable.
| dpflan wrote:
| What are you using these for? Providing compute for customers
| that want to train/infer? What is the level of interest and
| level of success customers are seeing using these services Hot
| Aisle offers?
| latchkey wrote:
| We are a bare metal compute offering. They can be used for
| whatever people want to use them for (within legal limits, of
| course). Interest is much higher now that we've started to
| work with teams publishing benchmarks which show that H100's
| have a nice competitor [0].
|
| I'll admit, it is still early days. We just finished up
| another free compute [1] two week stint with a benchmarking
| team. One thing we discovered is that saving checkpoints is
| slow AF. I'm guessing an issue with ROCm. Hopefully get that
| resolved soon. Now we are in the process of onboarding the
| next team. [0]
| https://hotaisle.xyz/benchmarks-and-analysis/ [1]
| https://hotaisle.xyz/free-compute-offer/
| rvnx wrote:
| > We would love to offer hourly on-demand rates for
| individual GPUs, but we can't do so at this time due to a
| limitation in the ROCm/AMD drivers. This limitation
| prevents PCIe pass-through to a virtual machine, making
| multi-tenancy impossible. AMD is aware of this issue and
| has committed to resolving it.
|
| One idea to help you: Are you sure you need a virtual
| machine ? Couldn't you boot the machines under PXE to solve
| the imaging problem ?
|
| Essentially you have TFTP server that gives a Linux image
| and boot on it directly
| latchkey wrote:
| 1 chassis, 8 gpus.
|
| We want to be able to break that chassis up into
| individual GPUs and allocate 1 GPU to 1 "machine". I
| previously PXE booted 20,000 individual playstation 5
| diskless blades and I'm not sure how PXE would solve
| this.
|
| The only alternative right now is to do what runpod (and
| AMD's aac) are doing and do docker containers. But that
| has the limitation of docker in docker, so people end up
| having to repackage everything. You also can't easily run
| different ROCm versions since that comes from the host,
| and if you have 8 people on a single chassis... it
| becomes a nightmare to manage it.
|
| We're just patiently waiting for AMD to fix the problem.
| rvnx wrote:
| Got it it's clear, I thought you had 1 GPU in one chassis
| in some cases.
| rlupi wrote:
| https://docs.nvidia.com/dgx-superpod/reference-architecture-...
|
| NVIDIA large GPU supercomputers have separate compute-
| networking (between GPUs) and storage-networking (storage to
| GPUs, or storage to SSD, SSD to GPUs with CPU assistance). This
| helps avoid networking issues, even more if not using
| Infiniband.
|
| From what I read here and on your website, you don't go that
| route. I haven't found the equivalent system level reference
| architecture for MI300x from AMD. I wonder if you have a link
| to a public document where AMD provides guidance about this
| choice?
| derefr wrote:
| > even more if not using Infiniband
|
| It's interesting that the above "HPC reference architecture"
| shows a GPU-to-GPU Infiniband fabric, despite Nvidia also
| nominally pushing NVLink Switch (https://www.nvidia.com/en-
| us/data-center/nvlink/) for the HPC use-case.
| bee_rider wrote:
| How does NVLink work? Because I already know MPI and I'm
| not going to learn anything else, lol.
|
| Edit: after googling it looks like OpenMPI has some NVLink
| support, so maybe it is OK.
| zxexz wrote:
| I use OpenMPI with no issues over multiple H100 nodes and
| A100 nodes, with multiple infiniband 200G and ethernet
| 100G/200G networks, and RDMA (though using mellanox
| instead of broadcom cards, but afaik broadcom supports
| this just the same). Side note, make sure you compile
| nvidia_peermem correctly if you want GDRMA to work :)
| latchkey wrote:
| We have a separate OOB/east-west network which is 100G and
| would be used for external storage. We're spending an absurd
| amount of money on just cables.
|
| It is documented on the website [0], but I do see that I did
| not document the actual cards for that, will add when I wake
| up tomorrow. The card is:
|
| Broadcom 57504 Quad Port 10/25GbE,SFP28, OCP NIC 3.0
|
| As far as I know, AMD doesn't really have the docs, it is
| Dell. Their team actively helped us design this whole
| cluster.
|
| We haven't decided on which type storage we want to get yet.
| It'll really depend on customer demand and since we haven't
| deployed quite yet, we are punting that can down the road a
| bit. Our boxes do all have 122TB in them and we have some
| additional servers not listed as well with 122TB... so for
| now I think we can cobble something useful together.
|
| [0] https://hotaisle.xyz/networking/
| RobRivera wrote:
| Nice! Whats benchmark standard these days? Still Superbench or
| yall have something inhouse?
|
| Re: lead time quote :O I guess I got spoiled working for one of
| the major cloud vendors. The thought of poor b2b vendor support
| never entered my risk matrix.
|
| If you own your own cluster, the network bottleneck becomes
| less a dollar cost I suppose, since you arent being charged a
| premium to rent someone elses compute
| pheatherlite wrote:
| Being out of the loop for awhile. Has amd made anything similar
| to cuda? Are cots frameworks such as pytorch and tensorflow on
| par when running on amd hardware? What makes investing in amd
| cluster/chips worthwhile?
| JackYoustra wrote:
| Why xeon instead of epyc?
| startupsfail wrote:
| It seems the reliability, speed and scalability drops with the
| Ethernet are somewhat manageable.
|
| To quote the article - From our tests, we found that Infiniband
| was systematically outperforming Ethernet interconnects in
| terms of speed. When using 16 nodes / 128 GPUs, the difference
| varied from 3% to 10% in terms of distributed training
| throughput[1]. The gap was widening as we were adding more
| nodes: Infiniband was scaling almost linearly, while other
| interconnects scaled less efficiently.
|
| And then they do mention that the research team needs to debug
| unexplained failures on Ethernet that they've not seen on
| Infiniband. This actually can be the expensive part.
| Particularly if the failures are silent and cause numerical
| errors only.
| teaearlgraycold wrote:
| We just set up a small cluster of our own. We're not using
| infiniband but it didn't seem like it would be a 50 week lead
| time to setting it up. Where did you get that number?
| huqedato wrote:
| The only essential aspect this article doesn't answer: How much
| does it cost? All the rest is metadata. I would have preferred a
| clear table with vendors, prices and features. And less bla-bla.
| ea016 wrote:
| I couldn't share any pricing data since the discussions with
| providers are private. Instead, I added a graph of prices from
| gpulist.ai. For an Infiniband cluster, median is $2.3 per H100
| hour, average is $2.47.
| ilaksh wrote:
| $2.47 * 256 * 24 * 30 = $455k ?
| dijit wrote:
| Based solely on my own calculations that I made for the
| board of my company; this is within the parameters I would
| expect, yeah.
| silverlake wrote:
| Good info! I use an HPC with SLURM. 40k GPUs shared by hundreds
| of users. It works well enough. I don't know how the market for
| cloud-based clusters works. Why didn't OP use AWS or Google for
| on-demand training? Is it just down to cost?
| macksd wrote:
| If you do, in fact, need H100s, they can be very hard to get.
| Even the smaller flavors of A100 you sometimes request, wait
| days for, and then 1 node might show up during a weekend. And
| for the reasons described in the article and the fact that
| large training jobs can be network-limited, nicer networks can
| be a big deal.
| eigenvalue wrote:
| Lots of good and detailed information here, thanks. I'm curious
| why Ethernet interconnect is so unreliable in practice compared
| to the Infiniband. I would think that at this point, after a
| decade or more of current Ethernet standards, all the kinks would
| be worked out and the worst that would happen would be occasional
| latency spikes and a few lost packets that could be retransmitted
| quickly. Shouldn't the training frameworks be more robust to that
| sort of thing?
| rlupi wrote:
| Infiniband and ethernet are very different at the lowest
| levels. Ethernet interconnects use RoCE (RDMA over converged
| ethernet), which actually encapsulated infiniband transport in
| ethernet, but you still pay for higher routing latency, and you
| need separate compute-network and storage-network to avoid
| queueing (lossless ethernet).
|
| https://community.fs.com/article/infiniband-vs-ethernet-whic...
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RDMA_over_Converged_Ethernet
|
| Also... don't underestimate the PCI bus bottlenecks when you
| put 8x 400GB networking + 8x GPUs. There are ways now to have a
| tree of PCI switches and avoid overloading the main one, each
| GPU gets its own networking card and PCI switch.
| latchkey wrote:
| This is a great comment.
|
| Our cluster is 128 GPUs into a single Dell switch... should
| help with the queuing. We also have a separate e-w 100G
| network.
|
| This is why we went with Dell XE9680 chassis... people forget
| that PCI switches are quite important with this level of
| compute. Dell has done a good job here.
| eigenvalue wrote:
| Interesting, thanks. From the wikipedia link, this seems like
| the probable culprit for why things break:
|
| "Although in general the delivery order of UDP packets is not
| guaranteed, the RoCEv2 specification requires that packets
| with the same UDP source port and the same destination
| address must not be reordered."
| wmf wrote:
| In practice it's easy to design an Ethernet network that
| doesn't reorder packets.
| ec109685 wrote:
| How do the large clouds compare from an availability and cost
| perspective compared to finding a smaller provider and renting a
| dedicated cluster?
| choppaface wrote:
| The large clouds will often be able to give the biggest players
| a big discount. Perhaps not on raw GPU prices (maybe extended
| trial), but if you already have e.g. 1PB in object storage then
| they might give you 20-30% discount. Moreover if your contract
| is jumbo, they'll give you not only a Slack channel but send
| Forward Deployed Engineers to your office and/or help you build
| part of the model training software.
|
| But for a deployment the size of the OP (Photoroom) I doubt any
| of the big clouds would offer a discount. Especially if they
| were not already negotiating with multiple clouds.
|
| Probably the best argument for going with a large cloud
| provider on a smaller budget is that you already use some of
| their other services significantly and your MLE-to-devops
| headcount makes something like Photoroom's test infeasible.
| barbazoo wrote:
| > Electricity sources and CO2 emissions
|
| I love that they included this in their consideration and pointed
| out the impact running these GPUs has on the environment.
| storyinmemo wrote:
| Shameless employer promotion here while I work on H100 clusters
| today: https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/crusoe-puts-
| cpus-..., https://crusoe.ai/cloud/
|
| Iceland seems to have an excess of energy to population and
| it's very green.
| barbazoo wrote:
| I applaud the vision, I wish you folks hired remote software
| devs
| irq wrote:
| Crusoe is unabashedly anti-remote work, which is curious
| considering their company's environmental and energy
| locality focus. I interviewed with them, they are very much
| an old school "you must all work physically in San
| Francisco" company. I work for one of their competitors
| now, one that embraces remote work.
| 123yawaworht456 wrote:
| it has fuck all any impact if the electricity is sourced from
| nuclear/hydro/solar/wind/geothermal.
| barbazoo wrote:
| Well, exactly, that's their point. If possible, choose a data
| center location with access to renewable energy.
| joe_the_user wrote:
| The idea that consumer choice can change total carbon
| output is so absurd that it's better to boycott anything
| claiming some special source.
|
| Yes, the present CO2 output is a planet wide-catastrophe.
| No, your little "contribution" can't change that - if you
| don't buy cheap coal energy, someone will, etc. Strong
| state regulation forcing a decrease in total CO2 output
| with no exceptions is the only force that could save us in
| the near term (and I'm not holding my breath here but I had
| to say that). All your "market" and "choice" solutions are
| burning up like the California vegetation.
| barbazoo wrote:
| Wouldn't that be great, we wouldn't have to feel bad
| about destroying the planet anymore :) I don't think it's
| true though. Do you have any evidence that consumer
| choice does not have any impact on carbon emissions? In
| other areas it definitely does [1]
|
| > if you don't buy cheap coal energy, someone will
|
| No, not if everyone starts asking for clean energy
| instead. There isn't an infinite number of people, at
| some point demand for clean energy will make it
| unattractive to offer dirty energy.
|
| [1] https://news.climate.columbia.edu/2020/12/16/buying-
| stuff-dr...
| abdullahkhalids wrote:
| Generally, globally sub-optimal many-agent game-theoretic
| equilibria can't be escaped by individual agents shooting
| themselves in the foot. There is a reason why it is an
| equilibrium in the first place. If there a traffic jam
| every day that adds 30 min to everyone's drive, you can't
| solve it by asking some people to voluntarily take the
| alternate path that adds 1 hour to their drive.
|
| The correct way to move from the sub-optimal equilibrium
| to a better one is via global action i.e. changing the
| rules of the game. In the real world that means state
| level actions as GP talks about.
| Jun8 wrote:
| Say you want to burn about $500 as a curiosity project for 8
| nodes for a day. Any suggestions for what job to run?
| teaearlgraycold wrote:
| If you're just burning money you might as well mine crypto.
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