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Time-Shifted Computing Could Slash Data Center Energy Costs By Up To 30%

Thursday February 10, 2022. 01:02 AM , from Slashdot
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Recently, two computer scientists had an idea: if computers use energy to perform calculations, could stored data be a form of stored energy? Why not use computing as a way to store energy? What if information could be a battery, man? As it turns out, the idea isn't as far-fetched as it may sound. The 'information battery' concept, fleshed out in a recent paper (PDF), would perform certain computations in advance when power is cheap -- like when the sun is shining or the wind is blowing -- and cache the results for later. The process could help data centers replace up to 30 percent of their energy use with surplus renewable power.

The beauty of the system is that it requires no specialized hardware and imposes very little overhead. 'Information Batteries are designed to work with existing data centers,' write authors Jennifer Switzer, a doctoral student at UC San Diego, and Barath Raghavan, an assistant professor at the University of Southern California. 'Some very limited processing power is reserved for the IB [information battery] manager, which manages the scheduling of both real-time computational tasks and precomputation. A cluster of machines or VMs is designated for precomputation. The IB cache, which stores the results of these precomputations, is kept local for quick retrieval. No additional infrastructure is needed.'

In the model Switzer and Raghavan created to test the concept, the IB manager queried grid operators every five minutes -- the smallest time interval the operators offered -- to check the price of power to inform its predictions. When prices dipped below a set threshold, the manager green-lit a batch of computations and cached them for later. The system was pretty effective at reducing the need for expensive 'grid power,' as the authors call it, even when the pre-computation engine did a relatively poor job of predicting which tasks would be needed in the near future. At just 30 percent accuracy, the manager could begin to make the most of the so-called 'opportunity power' that is created when there is excess wind or solar power. In a typical large data center, workloads can be predicted around 90 minutes in advance with about 90 percent accuracy, the authors write. With a more conservative prediction window of 60 minutes, 'such a data center could store 150 MWh, significantly more than most grid-scale battery-based storage projects,' they say. An equivalent grid-scale battery would cost around $50 million, they note.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.
https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/22/02/09/2146247/time-shifted-computing-could-slash-data-center-...
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