Re: [Userops] Why is it hard to move from one machine to another? An analysis.

[Christopher Allan Webber]

Claes Wallin (韋嘉誠) writes:

> On Fri, Apr 10, 2015 at 12:42 PM, Elena ``of Valhalla''
> <address@hidden> wrote:
>> On 2015-04-09 at 20:14:16 -0400, Dave Crossland wrote:
>>> > Even worse, that model wastes energy at a spectacular rate.
>>> (Sure, its industrial scale so it uses a lot of energy. Running things at a
>>> personal scale necessarily can't use much. But, the economies of scale mean
>>> I suspect its not actually more wasteful watt for cpu cycle than your mini
>>> pc, plus, acmecorp's solar/dam powered datacenter in the desert/forest is
>>> greener than your mini pc powered by the utility grid which runs on
>>> coal/gas/nuclear.
>>
>> using watt per cpu cycle works best when you can optimize your hardware
>> so that the minimum amount of cycles are wasted, and this is easier when
>> your workload is high enough to require most of the resources of one or
>> more servers, most of the time.
>>
>> On a home server, you are likely to have limited requirements and lots
>> of unused cycles, so minimizing total energy per device may be the right
>> strategy, expecially when only one low-powered server-ish device is
>> basically enought for the needs of the whole home and having more
>> powerful device would just mean more wasted power.
>>
>> Of course, the economy of scale works in favour of power consumptions
>> of big datacenters, but for certain kinds of data they are just not a
>> valid alternative.
>
> Yeah, so the point is that massive data centers do not in fact waste
> energy (unless we want to go into Jevons Paradox [1]), but we are
> trading efficient computing for other values, like control of our own
> data.
>
> Or to embrace and extend the FSF's recent slogan: There is no Cloud,
> there's only other people's (very convenient and efficient!)
> computers.

Having started my career working at fixing machines in
$BIG_CLOUD_COMPANY datacenter, I have some skepticism of the efficiency
thesis here.  I think "cloud computing" has probably increased power
usage a lot (and also discarded hardware) since users are now running
both a machine at home and portions of many machines remotely they don't
know of.

But it's hard to quantify, so I guess it's not really a point against.
I'm just skeptical of the argument.

 - Chris