[HN Gopher] Data Centers, Temperature, and Power
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Data Centers, Temperature, and Power
Author : quectophoton
Score : 45 points
Date : 2025-06-27 17:42 UTC (3 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.backblaze.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.backblaze.com)
| leConbineatort wrote:
| Cannot browse website from france !!!??
| remram wrote:
| Works for me (from France)
| jeffbee wrote:
| Seems to be a mental mishmash. For one thing, they are taking it
| as given that temperature is relevant to device lifetime, but
| Google's FAST 2007 paper said "higher temperatures are not
| associated with higher failure rates".
|
| Second weird thing is that it says cooling accounts for 40% of
| data center power usage, but this comes right after discussing
| PUE without contextualizing PUE with concrete numbers. State-of-
| the-art PUE is below 1.1. The article then links to a pretty
| flimsy source that actually says server loads are 40% ... this
| implies a PUE of 2.5. That could be true for global IT loads
| including small commercial server rooms, but it hardly seems
| relevant when discussing new builds of large facilities.
|
| Finally, it's irritating when these articles are grounded in
| equivalents of American homes. The fact is that a home just
| doesn't use a lot of energy, so it's a silly unit of measure.
| These figures should be based on something that actually uses
| energy, like cars or aircraft or something.
| dijit wrote:
| > Seems to be a mental mishmash. For one thing, they are taking
| it as given that temperature is relevant to device lifetime,
| but Google's FAST 2007 paper said "higher temperatures are not
| associated with higher failure rates".
|
| Google have been wrong a couple of times, and this is one area
| where I think what they've said (18 years ago btw) might have
| had some time to meet the rubber of reality a bit more.
|
| Google also famously chose to disavow ECC as mandatory[0] but
| then quietly changed course[1].
|
| In fact, even within the field of memory: higher temperatures
| cause more errors[2], and voltage leaking is more common at
| higher temperatures within dense lithographic electronics
| (memory controllers, CPUs)[3].
|
| Regardless: thermal expansion and contraction _will_ cause
| degradation of basically any material that I can think of, so
| _if_ you can utilise the machines 100% consistently _and_
| maintain a solid temperature then maybe the hardware doesn 't
| age as aggressively as our desktop PCs that play games-
| assuming there's no voltage leaking going on to crash things.
|
| [0]: https://www.cs.toronto.edu/~bianca/papers/sigmetrics09.pdf
|
| [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14206811
|
| [2]: https://dramsec.ethz.ch/papers/mathur-dramsec22.pdf
|
| [3]:
| https://www.researchgate.net/publication/271300947_Analysis_...
| jeffbee wrote:
| I am not taking Google's result at face value, but the
| article shouldn't make assumptions without supporting
| evidence, either. ASHRAE used to say your datacenter should
| be 20o-25o which you know makes a certain amount of sense
| when it comes from an organization earning its money from
| installing and repairing CRACs. Now they admit that 18o-27o
| is common and they allow for up to 45o ambient designs. They
| are following the industry up.
| Python3267 wrote:
| This article was written for non-technical folks unfortunately. I
| read the phrase below and nearly puked from the corpo speech.
|
| > So, the methodology around temperature mitigation always starts
| at power reduction--which means that growth, IT efficiencies,
| right-sizing for your capacity...
| metadat wrote:
| The person who wrote the HDD failure rate quarterly reports
| recently retired. Sorry for the bad news, but what other
| reports or blog posts published by backblaze have you enjoyed
| reading? For me, the answer is.. none. I hope to be declared
| wrong and that the legacy of quality HDD reporting will live
| on.
| jakedata wrote:
| I have had high hopes for passive daytime radiative cooling since
| I read about it 10 years ago. Converting waste heat to an
| infrared wavelength that flies off into space day or night is
| apparently not that easy or cost effective right now.
|
| https://www.asme.org/topics-resources/content/new-solar-ener...
|
| https://www.skycoolsystems.com/
|
| https://www.nature.com/articles/s41377-023-01119-0
| quickthrowman wrote:
| This is unlikely to work in a data center with thousands or
| tens of thousands of servers emitting heat. Possibly this sort
| of system will some day function for buildings where only
| humans are emitting heat.
| louwrentius wrote:
| So Backblaze is going to invest in nuclear power?
|
| What is the purpose of this article exactly?
| quectophoton wrote:
| (2024)
|
| I forgot to put it in the title and I can't edit anymore.
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