Data Centers, Temperature, and Power
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...
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.
(2024)
I forgot to put it in the title and I can't edit anymore.
So Backblaze is going to invest in nuclear power?
What is the purpose of this article exactly?
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Cannot browse website from france !!!??
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...