> Delete old emails and pictures as data centres require vast amounts of water to cool their systems.
Also the UK government:
> Taken together, the 50 measures will make the UK irresistible to AI firms looking to start, scale, or grow their business. It builds on recent progress in AI that saw £25 billion of new investment in data centres announced since the government took office last July.
When George Orwell wrote 1984 it wasn’t just the Soviet Union he was criticizing.
He was also satirizing some of the most absurd parts of British political culture too. Doublethink wasn’t just part of Soviet political culture. It was part of British political culture and clearly still is based on what you just posted.
Nevermind water, there were (still are?) restrictions on new builds in the West London area because the grid could not cope due to the ever increasing number of data centres popping up in old trading estates.
The irony is that deletion is one of the most expensive operations in data infrastructure at a pretty fundamental level. It is likely going to consume far more power upon deletion than it would if you just left the data alone. Ignoring that deleting emails would have no consequential impact on water consumption, technically the advice is likely to make the situation worse.
The distasteful part of all this is that this is the government transparently deflecting responsibility for their incompetence. Instead of addressing their chronic mismanagement of the water supply they've decided the better course of action is to sell the narrative that this will all go away if you delete your vacation photos.
To be fair, it's not so much this government that should be blamed for chronic mismanagement - they inherited the situation. I would like to blame Thatcher for privatisation of essential monopolies and also the water company management for essentially diverting as much money as possible from their customers into their own pockets - Thames Water being the prime example of huge debts being created and money not being spent on upgrading infrastructure.
> The irony is that deletion is one of the most expensive operations in data infrastructure
I’m pretty sure the true irony is the government—an entity ostensibly at the service of its citizens—asking said denizens to perform low-impact actions detrimental to themselves so that massive faceless corporations can continue to exploit them with impunity while reaping massive profits and laughing all the way to the bank.
I used to work on the system at Google which processed deleted emails to ensure they are deleted across all systems it might have touched (eg, delete any calendar events created by the email, rebuild indexes, delete backup restore keys etc). Deleting an email was remarkably significantly more resource intensive compared to just leaving it alone, so this advice could only make the situation worse.
Do you happen to know why deleting lots of emails at once doesn't really work? Gmail that is. Select all 100k or so, delete, gets rid of the first N but not the rest, and N is order of some hundreds. It means delete old emails is far more time intensive than it should be.
Try just leaving the tab sitting open for an hour. I have a suspicion the frontend works iteratively on them in the background, and the UI only updates occasionally. I haven't tried it with deletions, but with "mark as read" on a triage inbox this has worked with 40k+ emails.
That system was what fed into the one I touched, which was an offline batch pipeline, so I wasn't tooinvolved with the Gmail internals that you're talking about. I know about 10 years ago many Googlers had the same sort of problems as you describe, I assume it's a tiny bit better these days, most of the backend has been replaced over that time. Expensive operations are often slow to ensure there is reasonable isolation between users, so you don't hurt someone elses experience when you do these things. They aren't frequent operations/CUJs so they aren't optimized either.
It would require a queueing and progress tracking infrastructure once a request gets too large to process in the span of a few seconds, which is a lot of stuff to build for a very rare operation.
> Delete old emails and pictures as data centres require vast amounts of water to cool their systems.
Let's ignore that most emails will be in semi-cold storage. Let's ignore that energy usage per email would be absolutely minimum. Did they not consider that thousands of people hitting the email servers requesting to view and then subsequently delete emails, wouldn't be an issue?
What I (tongue-in-cheek) suspect is that GCHQ and the like are having difficulty in searching so many emails. Maybe by reviewing the email it triggers a filter policy which aids in searching them. After all, the Online Safety Act mostly seems to be targetting data in transit.
That's pretty funny. It shows the slight gap in understanding about what "data centres" do, mixed with the classic advice to "don't print this email" to save power/trees.
The electrons in the AC power lines just had to dance slightly differently, but the ones in the transistors had to take one for the team and get dumped to ground.
I just heard this while driving, and I couldn't stop laughing at how confident the lady was in this being a solution. The storage pools will not suddenly no longer be needed because people stop syncing their devices to the cloud. It will just be used by something else.
One question I had is what would replacing fresh water with saltwater be viable? We have endless amounts of saltwater that would solve the wasting fresh water issue. I'm assuming some sort of closed system where evaporation isn't an issue to leave deposits. Saltwater would also have a lower freezing temp, so you could chill the water cooler than fresh as well.
I'm kind of suspicious of the water for datacenter stats, because I'm skeptical of the extent to which evaporation-based cooling is used rather than just air-to-air cooling. Wouldn't this result in visible plumes of condensation, as it does with power station cooling towers?
Also commercial water rates appear to be about £2.50 / cubic meter.
Desalination depends on electricity prices, which are fairly high in the UK at the moment.
My parent's hometown blocked data center construction because of concerns about traffic and water consumption.
This is the mid Atlantic where the wet bulb and dry bulb temperature are always very close so the water would be useless for cooling. And of course there are few things that add less traffic than empty buildings full of computers.
Also a lot of the non-AI stuff is still air cooled. In fact I know people at a couple large public tech companies spinning up AI hardware and even for that they're going with air cooling because it's all their OPs people are familiar with.
I wish people were more precise with communicating the actual problem.
> Also commercial water rates appear to be about £2.50 / cubic meter.
I even became interested in how much energy is needed to desalinate water by boiling it, taking into account recuperation and everything else.
> Desalination depends on electricity prices, which are fairly high in the UK at the moment.
Electricity prices are largely dependent on the need to deliver a steady flow of energy and store it, which are not a concern in the context of desalination water.
> 2. Many datacenters are no where near salt water.
If only we had a way of moving water around from places where it was plentiful to places that are not. Seriously though, this is a limitation? Vegas is no where near water, and that didn't stop it from being.
Using chilled brine as a cooling medium is common in industrial processes, unfortunately it needs to be chilled and that usually comes via an evaporative cooling tower. Assuming the sea is close and the temperature low enough, an open loop pulling from and discharging to the sea isn't than big of an engineering challenge.
Closed loop water cooling probably doesn't make a lot of sense at scale; radiators aren't very efficient at the relatively cool temperatures this sort of system would be operating at. Maybe if the water loop was cooled by refrigeration systems? That would be expensive though.
Closed loop water systems is a common form of cooling in large/commercial buildings. Typically, a large chiller unit on the roof with the cold water piped throughout the building connected to individual blowers. I've been told it is much more cost efficient.
If that's not how they are using the water, then what are they using it for? Swamp coolers?
A closed loop water system by definition doesn't "use up" water! It only matters for this discussion if there's a continuous supply of new fresh water going in.
I want a breakdown of how much energy would be saved by deleting old emails vs energy spent by people using VPNs now because of the Online Safety Act :)
Storage on spinning disks does. Storage on ssds does as well but should be much less. Cold backups don't. Now, the idea that people can just delete their cat pictures to meaningful impact cooling in the dcs is just garbage, particularly now when most of the energy used in the dcs goes to gpus
My understanding is that SSDs are in the sub-watt territory when idle. So ironically the act of deleting the email instead of keeping the drive in steady-state will likely use significantly more power.
If the drives are spinning, they generate heat. The drives spin regardless if they are empty or full. In an array setup in large storage pools, there's no spinning down the drives either. Sadly, there's no countering these suggestions to those making them, as they clearly have no understanding of what they are talking about. They're just trying to make their 15 minutes.
It's one thing if they want to raise awareness of how much water is being used by data centers, but it crosses into absurdity with suggestions like "delete your data from the cloud".
Some of the responses here are assuming that your old emails are sat there, quiescent. A better model might be that they are part of a dataset that is actively scanned, repeatedly, so deleting them makes those scanning processes more efficient.
Exactly what those processes might be is left as an exercise for the reader.
In theory if you delete enough you can power off a server.
In practice the random storage and delayed deletion makes this an absurdly asynchronous event.
In reality the UK just doesn't have that many consumer data centres, they mostly serve business. There's not likely even that much AI compute in the UK (yet).
The actual reason (as said elsewhere is water storage planning).
The only thing I can think of is that emails accumulate that that means more storage must be added at the data centres, requiring more electricity use. This seems trivial compared to AI power demands to me.
Storing pictures and emails in a data center does generate heat, but it is negligible. Also, claims of data center water usage are heavily overstated. Some do, but only during summer months. I assume the reason for the UK’s asinine advice is because of they think there is a link between heat generation and water usage at data centers. While a link does exist, it is not straight forward.
I have only ever toured a data center once, but the one I toured had no water usage by the cooling infrastructure as far as I could tell. However, the facility’s APUE was something like 1.7, which is high. I have read that some facilities with impressively low APUE numbers use water during particularly hot summer days, which is presumably for evaporative cooling. Unfortunately, I have yet to see one of these facilities in person to know the details beyond what has been publicly written.
If it counts for anything, I have hundreds of commits in OpenZFS. I know some things about data centers from a mix of professional contacts since my work is used in them (which is how I got the tour in the first place), and personal interest in the subject, but I am far from an expert on all aspects of how data centers work. Speaking of which, I doubt there is any one person who is an expert on all aspects of how data centers work, since the knowledge is spread across multiple types of experts. A physicist would not be my first choice of expert when asking questions about data centers. A data center technician would be a better person to ask.
Readit News
Also the UK government:
> Taken together, the 50 measures will make the UK irresistible to AI firms looking to start, scale, or grow their business. It builds on recent progress in AI that saw £25 billion of new investment in data centres announced since the government took office last July.
https://www.gov.uk/government/news/prime-minister-sets-out-b...
He was also satirizing some of the most absurd parts of British political culture too. Doublethink wasn’t just part of Soviet political culture. It was part of British political culture and clearly still is based on what you just posted.
Is this holding two ideas in your head at the same time, or holding contradictory ideas in your head at the same time?
Dead Comment
The distasteful part of all this is that this is the government transparently deflecting responsibility for their incompetence. Instead of addressing their chronic mismanagement of the water supply they've decided the better course of action is to sell the narrative that this will all go away if you delete your vacation photos.
I’m pretty sure the true irony is the government—an entity ostensibly at the service of its citizens—asking said denizens to perform low-impact actions detrimental to themselves so that massive faceless corporations can continue to exploit them with impunity while reaping massive profits and laughing all the way to the bank.
And even if it does complete, you'll often never know. Upon command, Gmail tells you "I'll do it later". And often never alerts of completion.
Let's ignore that most emails will be in semi-cold storage. Let's ignore that energy usage per email would be absolutely minimum. Did they not consider that thousands of people hitting the email servers requesting to view and then subsequently delete emails, wouldn't be an issue?
What I (tongue-in-cheek) suspect is that GCHQ and the like are having difficulty in searching so many emails. Maybe by reviewing the email it triggers a filter policy which aids in searching them. After all, the Online Safety Act mostly seems to be targetting data in transit.
One question I had is what would replacing fresh water with saltwater be viable? We have endless amounts of saltwater that would solve the wasting fresh water issue. I'm assuming some sort of closed system where evaporation isn't an issue to leave deposits. Saltwater would also have a lower freezing temp, so you could chill the water cooler than fresh as well.
Also commercial water rates appear to be about £2.50 / cubic meter.
Desalination depends on electricity prices, which are fairly high in the UK at the moment.
This is the mid Atlantic where the wet bulb and dry bulb temperature are always very close so the water would be useless for cooling. And of course there are few things that add less traffic than empty buildings full of computers.
Also a lot of the non-AI stuff is still air cooled. In fact I know people at a couple large public tech companies spinning up AI hardware and even for that they're going with air cooling because it's all their OPs people are familiar with.
I wish people were more precise with communicating the actual problem.
I even became interested in how much energy is needed to desalinate water by boiling it, taking into account recuperation and everything else.
> Desalination depends on electricity prices, which are fairly high in the UK at the moment.
Electricity prices are largely dependent on the need to deliver a steady flow of energy and store it, which are not a concern in the context of desalination water.
1. A closed system cannot exhaust heat via evaporative cooling, which would defeat the purpose.
2. Many datacenters are no where near salt water.
3. There are likely reliability issues that would need to be overcome and it is simply cheaper to use fresh water.
If only we had a way of moving water around from places where it was plentiful to places that are not. Seriously though, this is a limitation? Vegas is no where near water, and that didn't stop it from being.
If that's not how they are using the water, then what are they using it for? Swamp coolers?
Encouraging people to log on and delete old pics and emails is only going to create more heat as servers have to spin up access to stuff.
The real culprit of data-center heat usage is surely AI
It's one thing if they want to raise awareness of how much water is being used by data centers, but it crosses into absurdity with suggestions like "delete your data from the cloud".
Exactly what those processes might be is left as an exercise for the reader.
In practice the random storage and delayed deletion makes this an absurdly asynchronous event.
In reality the UK just doesn't have that many consumer data centres, they mostly serve business. There's not likely even that much AI compute in the UK (yet).
The actual reason (as said elsewhere is water storage planning).
I have only ever toured a data center once, but the one I toured had no water usage by the cooling infrastructure as far as I could tell. However, the facility’s APUE was something like 1.7, which is high. I have read that some facilities with impressively low APUE numbers use water during particularly hot summer days, which is presumably for evaporative cooling. Unfortunately, I have yet to see one of these facilities in person to know the details beyond what has been publicly written.
If it counts for anything, I have hundreds of commits in OpenZFS. I know some things about data centers from a mix of professional contacts since my work is used in them (which is how I got the tour in the first place), and personal interest in the subject, but I am far from an expert on all aspects of how data centers work. Speaking of which, I doubt there is any one person who is an expert on all aspects of how data centers work, since the knowledge is spread across multiple types of experts. A physicist would not be my first choice of expert when asking questions about data centers. A data center technician would be a better person to ask.