Every time a person runs a Google search, watches a YouTube video or sends a message through Gmail, the company’s data centers full of computers use electricity. Those data centers around the world continuously draw almost 260 million watts — about a quarter of the output of a nuclear power plant.I find it interesting, that's all.
Up to now, the company has kept statistics about its energy use secret. Industry analysts speculate it was because the information was embarrassing and would also give competitors a clue to how Google runs its operations.
Thursday, September 8, 2011
Google: Electric Use = 1/4 Output of a Nuclear Plant -- Not a Bakken Story
Link here.
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A key point is "around the world". I used to work with IBM mainframes and "server farms". This was almost five years ago but the IBM mainframes were water cooled. A "server stack" basically consisted of a laptop motherboard and hard drive with maybe a dozen sharing a screen, keyboard and other peripherals.
ReplyDeleteFive years later they probably have centralized periferals for perhaps hundreds of "motherboards". This is not a surprise. It can potentially give a picture of how many billion instructions per second the google servers can perform.
I noted the same thing, "around the world," and was actually going to comment on that, but then let it go.
ReplyDeleteThank you for putting things into perspective.