The night before last, deep in the night I was listening to the BBC I think it would have been. There was a news item saying that Iceland was trying to persuade the world to locate all its large computer servers there.
The reason? Apparently cooling the total heat generated by these things is equivalent in greenhouse terms to the entire airline industry of the world. There is heaps of green energy in Iceland and with modern telecomms these thing can be anywhere, so why not have a go at cornering the market in computer servers?
I can’t find a link and would appreciate it if anyone can. If true, this news item is interesting on several counts.
First, it seems to me rational that the world should locate industrial functions where they are optimal in terms of the ecosystem. But given the self-interest of nation states this is probably a pipe dream. Still you never know what might happen if the world ever takes the threat of dangerous climate change with the seriousness it deserves.
Secondly, Australia with a visionary government would surely be looking for similar opportunities. We have probably unequalled potential for green energy development, especially in terms of concentrated solar and geothermal.
So how about it Mr Rudd and Ms Wong? If we can do Netco we can do a major initiative to introduce an electricity network with zero emissions. There should even be synergies between these two great nation-building initiatives.
And, like Telstra, companies involved in mining and producing power with hydrocarbons can choose between becoming dinosaurs or getting with the new strength. They should see themselves as energy companies rather than hydrocarbon companies.
Wasn’t there a recent article somewhere about Iceland, it’s bankruptcy, and their attempt to corner the market in aluminium smelting due to all their green energy?
Apparently the main Icelandic male character trait is a kind of manly DIY ethic that meant the workers in the smelter took far more risks (in a risky work environment) than other cultures and ended up with worse work accident statistics, making the cheaper electricity moot.
I don’t really need some Icelandic Thor thumping on my servers with his mighty hammer, thanks, no matter how cheap the electricity is.
There’s audio and transcript of the story available on American Public Radio here.
Try: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/04/10/iceland_to_power_server_farms/
and http://marketplace.publicradio.org/display/web/2009/03/27/am_iceland_data_farm/
The new fibre to the home/office/factory system will massively increase the number of servers required in OZ. A good thing I say. Need over 1000 times more energy for an inferior broadband service. But hey whose green these days?
Huggy.
I don’t think its quite that bad. The comparison I’ve heard is that the IT industry produces about the same amount of CO2 as the airline industry (ie its not just the cooling).
Whilst I agree about the potential for using green energy (or even just cleaner than coal fired power) to power data centres at the moment there are so many energy efficiency gains to be made in the industry it would be like installing a solar power a/c system at home before bothering to put in ceiling insulation or awnings on north facing windows.
We should definitely send our brown coal fueled smelters to Iceland.
Spot on, Chris. And not just for the interwebs, either.
Brian: the synergies between a nationwide fibre optic network and green energy system are huge. We definitely need smart grids to manage the fluctuating outputs.
Perhaps they could issue a new currency backed by the servers. Then their banks would be in a position to give massive loans to trustworthy foreigners in Wall Street and the City, generating huge wealth for everybody …
Chris@4
You are entirely correct. There is a big push on to increase the energy efficiency of server farms and thus reduce the aircon load. Measures include dc busses and high efficiency switchmode stuff. Newer processors are more energy efficient as well.
Energy storage and backup generation are basically mandatory. Iceland (as the name possibly suggests) has a bit of a cooling advantage
Huggy
Eggs. One. Basket.
Iceland attacked. Kablooie. Internet down everywhere.
No thanks.
You wouldn’t even need to lose Iceland, Helen. Accidentally digging up the monstro pipe into the place would do it. (The necessary size of which is a problem in itself.)
As Helen notes putting all the servers in one country is a mad idea. However, if we were genuinely pricing carbon properly on a world scale it is likely that quite a few servers would relocate there – the energy is green, the workforce skilled and most of the year all you need is to open the windows.
Given their tiny population, I imagine even 10% of the global server market would be enough to restore the economy.
David @1,
You may be thinking of Michael Lewis’s recent article, at http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2009/04/iceland200904. But, as Lewis points out, there is a catch in locating industry to Iceland:
Huggybunny, didn’t you learn at school that Iceland is green and Greenland is icy? Maybe that was a New Zealand thing. I don’t think its climate is much colder than NZ, in fact. But can’t be bothered googleing to check.
Attacks and accidental cable cuttings aside, I’m not sure storing all our
porn, games and cashvaluable data on top of an active volcano is the bestest idea ever…MikeM wrote:
That’s the one Mike – fascinating stuff, especially about their imploding economy. I’d forgotten about the Elves
Oh, the Elves. The Elves!
I can’t imagine Bjork would be very pleased about sharing the country with hundreds of acres of server farms.
She would probably be driven to write a haunting, disjointed, maundering song about it.
Reckon the workers laying down the fibre cable in the Aussie bush a going to have to worry more about yowies than elves.
I reckon Bjork is actually a Yowie. She sounds like one.
I’m all for it.
That said, a friend of mine is now working in the global warming policy arena in Canberra – and he reckons we’re all screwed. Its too late already. We’re essentially a pestilential plague of a species who deserve to be wiped out, unregulated economic growth has been a complete global disaster, everyhting weve beleived in for 100 years is complete garbage, and we’ve all collectively taken a big dump on our childrens and grandchildrens future – who will now urinate on our memory for ever. Especially those of us who should have known better.
I was glad he called up from Canberra – it was great to touch base.
C’mon, they’re completely frigging nuts.
“Send me your poor servers, your huddled mainframes …”
The only thing funnier in the post than Iceland’s idea was calling the Rudd Government “visionary”.
Thanks for the Easter funnies, but April Fools Day was last week.
Of course it is … you needed someone to tell you that? Never fear, geo-engineering will save us!
Howard C is a drop bear.
Iceland
land of geothermal energy… any active volcanoes? any earthquake zones?
Happy Easter to you too, Lefty E.
I’ve suspected we’re screwed for some time myself, actually (and have apologised to my sons). The denialists have achieved their goal.
Well, they can wear the intergenerational urinary consequences of their idiocy.
Me, I’m going down swingin!
It’s technically impractical, and will be for the foreseeable future. Each connection you make from one computer to another passes through several pieces of network equipment. Each time you pass through a piece of network equipment, you add a fraction of a second to the time it takes to send and receive each piece of data. In this page, there’s at least hundreds of pieces of data that travel between wherever you are and wherever 202.174.103.137 (the server that hosts this site, otherwise known as mail.nationalforum.com.au) is.
If you move your server overseas, you add more pieces of network equipment that you have to traverse before you reach your goal. This can mean the difference between a 225ms response time per packet of data (for a US-hosted site I run) and a 14ms response time per packet of data. As a packet is typically measured in bytes (rather than kilobytes, you’ve got lots of packets before you get a web page (as an example, the ping I sent to get the response times above was 32 bytes).
There’s a huge competitive advantage in localising hosting (via just leaving your site in a country that it serves, or using a caching service like Akamai) as it means your web site loads faster. And that’s just for web sites – at work, I’ve got ~60 servers to deal with, and some move traffic measured in gigabytes. Our total storage is measured in multiple terabytes, and that’s reasonably small-scale compared to a medium-sized corporation. So every ms of network delay caused by adding more network devices between you and your data has a huge flow-on effect.
In short, dumb idea.
Alister, I reckon the Icelanders who want our servers are finance people (and not particularly competent ones, judging by recent events), so it’s highly unlikely they have any appreciation of the technical issues.
Alister @27. It provides a cost trade-off that some people might well find attractive for certain uses, such as tier 3 storage. Not everything is time sensitive for delivery and I would suggest that most very-high/ultra-high volume data transfers aren’t particularly time sensitive.
Data Centers are responsible for about 0.3% of global Greenhouse emissions (about 25% of total IT emissions), and that’s expected to grow to about 1.5% by 2020. Their growth is just ridiculous. the power company supplying SF and Silicon Valley says data centre power consumption grew from 50-75MW in 2005 to 400-500MW in 2007.
Big problem for companies to manage on every level, but they’re a point source for consumption and emissions, so there’s bang for your buck in achieving improvements.
d
Third tier storage involves pretty large movements of data. It’s not hugely time-sensitive, but if it’s still running tomorrow you’ve got a problem. My tiered storage is all in the same rack – I want it off my expensive disks the same day, not two days after, stinking up my bandwidth.
But to move off this before I turn this thread into Nerdatus Prodeo… dumb idea, as there’s nothing stopping us from powering data centres with renewable energy now. You don’t need to pick up your servers and plonk them in a spot without the necessary bandwidth to accommodate them.
M-H @ 13, Iceland’s climate seems New Zealandish at least in Reykjavík.
Lefty E @ 20, thanks for the gloom. The post lacked my usual doom and gloom, but you fixed that!
Howard C @ 21, they might be nuts, but according to Wiki their per capita GDP is fourth or fifth in the world depending on how you count it.
I didn’t mean that the Rudd government was visionary. Anything but!
Ambi @ 24, hydro as well as geothermal, and yes to volcanoes and earthquakes. Sounds exciting!
I’m going to be the tedious pet libertarian and predict that the market will sort this question out.
Or rather, individuals will work out for themselves the right mix of cheap power, low temperatures, latency, cost, elves etc; and that this gestalt integration of information and self-interest will be denounced heartily hereabouts as Oh Noes The Market.
Jacques, if as Alister says it’s a really dumb idea, and I’m inclined to think he’s right, then the market will sort it out. There’s also the security issue that Helen identified @ 9, which might not be sorted by the market.
The point remains, however, that there may be things that Australia could do optimally here with our potential access to green energy that rationally would be better done here if the welfare of the ecosystem was given proper weighting, which, in free market conditions, would most likely be done somewhere else.
And other countries are not past tipping the playing field a bit by evil subsidies to make sure that they are.
Anyone noticed in their travels where sources of granular application data (leading to cyber and air travel being equally greenhouse profligate) can be found as to how much CO2(atmos) is down to google, how much to youtube, how much used in pron2pron bittorrents, etc ?
Google as key investor in green power companies sounds good to me: they’ll have the moolah, they have the motive, they have the ability to organize it.
Brian @ 13: “M-H @ 13, Iceland’s climate seems New Zealandish at least in Reykjavík.”
Relative to Darwin, maybe
As an old hand at high-latitude climates, I was suspicious, and looked up Invercargill, down at the bottom end of the South Island. Reykjavik is on average about 5oC colder than Invercargill in the corresponding month. The rainfall is slightly less, but pretty comparable.
But the biggest difference is in summer and winter daylight hours. Reykjavik is very close to the Arctic Circle (64oN) and has almost 24 hours a day of low-altitude sunlight in summer, and the complimentary gloom and darkness in winter. Invercargill (48oS) is at a latitude corresponding to, say, France, and has long summer days and short winter ones, but not egregiously so.
But back on topic-
How illusory was the huge development index for Iceland? Surely some of it was an artefact of their now defunct dodgy banking practices?
And yes, volcanoes, geysers and earthquakes all apply. Geologically, Iceland is not a continental fragment at all, it is part of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, the plate boundary between Eurasia and North America, heaped up above sea due to its exceptional amount of lava extrusion! Reykjavik means “Smoky Bay”, and it is well named
Overcentralisation of too much serverdom there would indeed by silly.
Thanks andyc, it said subpolar climate and I knew they were much higher latitude, but thought with the Gulf Stream and Reykjavík kinda being SW, but there did seem to be a lot of ice and snow around in the pics. But then I’ve only been to NZ once, in summer, and as luck would have it the famous underarm bowling incident happened while I was there.
Here’s a nice illustrated article on Iceland’s climate.
CPRS and Kyoto style schemes aside, what I want to know is this: where can we get the biggest bang for a buck in terms of global emission reductions?
Anyone got a handy list of low-hanging fruit?
My new distributed corporation will have servers in Kiama (codename: blowhole), Kansas (codename: cornhole) and Iceland (codename: Icehole)
Bit hard to explain to the techs to keep sticking the equipment in the icehole or the cornhole though. May require a rethink.
Lefty E @ 37, I was waiting for someone clever to give you an answer, but I think they must be away.
I imagine that energy saving, usually reckoned at 30% would be lowest hanging fruit.
Other than that, I’d say that getting rid of coal is the sine qua non for a decent life on earth for your grandkids. Hansen reckons we need to do it by 2020 in developed countries and by 2030 in the rest. He says if we mine and burn all the coal in the world, cooking the planet is possible. If we also burn the tar sands, he reckons it is dead certain.
Canada is currently mining tar sands.
“Cooking the planet” is not a metaphor. What he is talking about is a Venus type atmosphere, where we will never again have oceans. Remember this guy cut his teeth on studying the atmosphere of Venus.
There’s my bit of genuine doom for Easter
Thanks Brian – I think!
LE, apart from solar hot water, light bulbs and turning off appliances at the wall etc, I heard a bloke on the radio say the other day that where we could all improve is in our management of the electric jug. Typically we heat a lot more water than we use and heat the jug 10 minutes before we make the tea or coffee and then reheat it before we do. He says you’d be surprised how much power this wastes.
Another way of looking at the “low hanging fruit” issue is to think of things that are discretionary, like a lot of air travel, or what won’t cause economic disruption if we go down that track, or tracks that we are going down that we shouldn’t have.
An example of the last is making biofuel from corn and palm oil. Perhaps what we should be doing is putting a lot of money into boron for transport (second half of the post). Hydrogen might be like CCS – a cover to keep the status quo.
Ceasing the clearing of tropical rainforest is also something that we should put effort into directly, rather than hope that bodgie ETS schemes do the trick (IMHO).