AWS acquires Talen's 960MW nuclear data center campus in Pennsylvania
datacenterdynamics.com
datacenterdynamics.com
A campus is a group of buildings and land that are part of one institution. I've been in multiple campuses that have power plants (and where the primary purpose of the campus is not generating power).
The idea of a datacenter campus that makes its own power is a reasonable one.
The title doesn't say "next to". It says "960MW nuclear data center campus".
What makes it "nuclear"? Well in this case it's because it's next to a nuclear power plant, but it would be just as valid to use that wording for a campus that contains a nuclear power plant. In fact I think the latter is more straightforward.
And funnily enough if you look at the picture, it looks like it's one big campus too!
Is that really so? I was under the impression that even data centers go through peak and bottom usage as do most online services.
The trick is that you sign a contract with the utility to guarantee a particular type of usage - and utilities love people who burn Watt-hours rather then Volt-Amps (i.e. a power factor near 1) since they're a lot easier to service, and people who promise to use power fairly consistently.
The utility says "we'll give you a lower overall rate, provided you promise to consume at least this much electricity" - in practice of course, you could consume less but you'll pay for it no matter what.
But compute is great for this model: it's fast to move applications onto and off servers, so hitting that minimum is easy.
Because when the sun is up over the Pacific ocean, everyone is asleep, and all of your datacenters are quiet.
A modern datacenter serving some consumer facing service likely sees a big difference in cpu usage and thus power usage between peak and off peak.
Otoh, if it's doing non-interactive data processing, it could be near 100% capacity consistently.
Personally, I'm guessing AWS has a noticable peak and trough on power. But if it makes sense, they do have the spot market which could be used to attract or repel load in order to hit a consumption target.
https://hbr.org/2001/03/harnessing-the-power-of-idle-compute...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributed.net
For a while I was in charge of the EFF Cooperating Computing Award. When it was announced, the announcement said
> However, the computer industry produces millions of new computers each year, which sit idle much of the time, running screen savers or waiting for the user to do something. EFF is encouraging people to pool their computing power over the Internet, to work together to share this massive resource.
That was in the 1990s. :-)
It's funny to think of just how inaccurate this became for subsequent CPU and chipset architecture, I guess because of convergent trends in customers wanting to save power for ecological, financial, and mobile device battery life reasons.
You are right. My previous computer was AMD Athlon, and even it near halved consumption when idle.
Modern machines extremely power saving, because desktop CPUs shared many features from Notebook platforms (for example speed step frequency change), and I see more than 6x difference of consumption of whole machine, even when I myself too conservative to use sleep/idle modes, because some programs don't behave adequate in such environment.
Sure. Even for the on-demand stuff they have a vested interest in reducing power consumption as much as they can.
They charge the customers a flat rate per hour, so every joule they can cut out is money in their pocket.
It would be different if they were charging the customers by the kwH or something.
You just have to be sure to make the spot stuff juuust unreliable enough that people can’t run their full workloads on it all the time.
Some time, before CDN invention, very large sites distributed traffic between few time zones around world and so they distributed load for a whole 24h. But when CDNs appeared, local peaks returned.
And unfortunately, not much things possible to run at classic DC environment, nearly only ML tasks. For example, for classic supercomputing tasks, typical DCs have too slow network (too large latency for things like C++ MPI).
Is it? What causes there to be unused capacity when there is currently so much demand for training?
I give less credit to systems that just "agree to buy the output from a distant generator via the grid" (my own quote). Can I say I support coal electricity generation by saying 100% of my electricity comes from coal when it's really some mix that I can't control?
If amazon buys a power plant, my only thoughts about an increase in villainy from the status quo fall into the "monopoly" category.
But Dr. No had a pool type reactor :D
But also I do think it fits. Looking at super villains, they’re usually just powerful people with slightly unusual property, who also happen to be evil.
Lex Luthor’s company Lexcorp was an aerospace company. In the first Superman movie, Luthor was a pretty weird and relatively unremarkable guy. In the James Bond movie Tomorrow Never Dies the super villain was just a guy with a global media company who created calamity and murder so that he could report on it first.
Nuclear power and radiation have often been themes for comic book heroes and villains. I think it’s reasonable to read the (misleading) headline and think “oh great now Bezos owns a nuclear power plant, he’s going to become a super villain” as the sort of non-serious comment prevalent on the internet. People say the same about Musk all the time.
I don’t think it’s meant to be taken literally.
Blue Origin is owned by Bezos and NASA is looking at a nuclear fission propulsion system for a Mars mission :).
960MWe is 71% of one of them.
The 80GB version runs 300W on PCIe and 400W on SXM4. (Which is my third reason to hate the current wave of "AI" bullshit, the first two being industry scale copyright violation and barely better than slave labor).
Think about how to increase quality of life and output, the companies will automatically increase efficiency to increase profits and reduce costs.
Can you elaborate on what you have in mind when you clam that crypto is "pushing the world forward"?
My sarcasm detector went off when I got to this bit.
So, 1 million GPU-based servers, which is just double of what Meta is planning to use for its own supercomputer. So, not that much.
240k machines is a big number, I myself seen DC for 40k machines, but they talking about campus, so reasonable assume, there would be not one DC but few DC buildings.
50 MW
www.google.com/maps/search/Apple+Mesa/@33.3470187,-111.6092537,1311m/data=!3m1!1e3!5m1!1e4?entry=ttu
So they didn't buy it, they're just leasing half the output!
https://www.google.com/maps/@41.1396769,-95.8301348,8221a,35...
https://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=16/41.1718/-95.8068&layer... ("Google Data Center")
Note the corn ethanol manufacturing plant next door was allowed to labelled, as was the coal power plant.
But if the data center(s) are all getting power from one source, that's a SPOF.
(they could run lines I guess)
(AWS/Google/Microsoft's datacenters are a _lot_ more efficient on a per-compute basis than the typical small corporate datacenter; like 30+% lower power waste because of inefficient AC and power distribution design.)
Heck, we even have a National Nuclear Data Center: https://www.nndc.bnl.gov/
This is going to get confusing.
edit: guilty of 1) not reading article first, and 2) being overly pessimistic about the cryptocurrency climate.
It sounds like they still have plans to mine crypto…
You can get an estimate of how much new electricity will be needed by the GPUs already ordered but not delivered yet.
Tech companies that want cheap power for their data centers would make sense to buy facilities close to power plants, but savvy investors trying to profit off the market discrepancies would be investing in the forges and factories that can make the transformers domestically and start lobbying their congresspeople to get incentives from the DoE and other pork barrel spending to make building transformers cheaper and faster domestically. I think that will happen before we see the existing shortage lead to brownouts because energy demands are constantly growing, and both parties have incentives to grow domestic manufacturing.