FOOTNOTE: James Watt was a 22 year old genius with no connections or proper education in an age of privilege. Hence the tradesmen of Glasgow would not issue him a permit to open a shop in the town. So Adam Smith, foe of privilege and Dean of Faculty, invoked a "privilege" of the University, appointed him Mathematical Instrument Maker to the University in the early 1750s and he proceeded to design experiments for Joseph Black, physical Chemist. Watt also made his fundamental contributions to the theory of heat--thermodynamics--and went on to earn a great many patents.
Vernon, thank you for adding those details! I love the Smith-Watt Glasgow connection, and that someone who was a fine detail instrument maker created what we now think of as large-scale "hard tech". Another reason this is one of my favorite stories is the skill complementarity of Watt and Boulton; Watt didn't have the temperament or patience with people to build the customer-facing side of the business, in which Boulton was a genius.
Agree that efficiency in cooling systems will reduce the overall power requirements, but may be more than offset by increasing energy density of the datacenters. Essentially all of the power going into a datacenter, for whatever application, eventually is released as heat into the ambient. With some of the hyperscale centers planned for Northern Virginia, this should have significant heat island and local weather impacts which have not been thoroughly examined by researchers.
Excellent point. There's a phenomenon in economics that we call the Jevons effect (named after William Stanley Jevons from his book The Coal Question): when you improve the efficiency of something so you get more from less, it's cheaper for you to consume more, so in aggregate consumption may go up *and* input use may go up even if input use per unit of output falls due to efficiency. Your point seems very similar.
If you are interested in how the liquid cooling data center market is evolving, now LG is looking to enter:
https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/cooling/lg-wants-to-move-from-cooling-homes-to-cooling-data-centers-the-company-is-also-considering-subscription-services-for-continuous-revenue
FOOTNOTE: James Watt was a 22 year old genius with no connections or proper education in an age of privilege. Hence the tradesmen of Glasgow would not issue him a permit to open a shop in the town. So Adam Smith, foe of privilege and Dean of Faculty, invoked a "privilege" of the University, appointed him Mathematical Instrument Maker to the University in the early 1750s and he proceeded to design experiments for Joseph Black, physical Chemist. Watt also made his fundamental contributions to the theory of heat--thermodynamics--and went on to earn a great many patents.
Vernon, thank you for adding those details! I love the Smith-Watt Glasgow connection, and that someone who was a fine detail instrument maker created what we now think of as large-scale "hard tech". Another reason this is one of my favorite stories is the skill complementarity of Watt and Boulton; Watt didn't have the temperament or patience with people to build the customer-facing side of the business, in which Boulton was a genius.
Agree that efficiency in cooling systems will reduce the overall power requirements, but may be more than offset by increasing energy density of the datacenters. Essentially all of the power going into a datacenter, for whatever application, eventually is released as heat into the ambient. With some of the hyperscale centers planned for Northern Virginia, this should have significant heat island and local weather impacts which have not been thoroughly examined by researchers.
Excellent point. There's a phenomenon in economics that we call the Jevons effect (named after William Stanley Jevons from his book The Coal Question): when you improve the efficiency of something so you get more from less, it's cheaper for you to consume more, so in aggregate consumption may go up *and* input use may go up even if input use per unit of output falls due to efficiency. Your point seems very similar.