Innovation in Software

Whilst I’ve worked in data centres before – and am all too familiar with how hot, noisy, industrial and dangerous they can be – I sometimes forget how the software industry I now work in has an industrial footprint in those rooms. It’s easy to think of my business as being ‘clean’, because the dirt is so well hidden.

Plans for Google’s new data centre in Dalles, as the blueprints published by Harper’s shows, should remind us just how industrial our business really is.

Combined with the annotation by Ginger Strand, we get a picture of how big this data centre is. Three buildings of over 68,000 square foot each and electricity consumption equivalent to that needed to power 82,000 homes, a third of which will be used just to keep the building temperature at a reasonable level.

Thanks to its location much of the energy used every day will be supplied via hydroelectric power, however its very existence has caused other technology firms to up their data centre spending, and it’s unlikely all of that capacity will be run on renewable power. And besides, every watt of clean energy powering a server is a watt not powering a domestic home.

It’s also worth remembering this isn’t “the” Google data centre. It’s “a” Google data centre.

For years now they have been pushing racks into peering sites and DCs around the globe as well as smaller facilities of their own – an estimated million servers are out there running Google sites, and there are more data centres planned by Google and their competitors over the next four years. Already data centres consume more power in the United States than the army of some 100-million-plus American monster-sized televisions. As the magazine itself says, the Web “is no ethereal store of ideas, shimmering over our heads like the aurora borealis. It is a new heavy industry, an energy glutton that is only growing hungrier.”

Better virtualisation of servers is going to help, but there’s a limit to how much you can virtualise. Is the time now right for us to get smarter again about how we use clock cycles? Is the efficiency-first stance of programming we’ve consigned to the era of the 8-bit machine now going to become fashionable again?

Maybe though, we could do a little to educate the public to make use of this vast industry a little more efficiently. Does the quest for the top 100 current hot trends at Google really suggest that we’re using this power wisely?

Via RoughType

Intel are going down the path of smaller and less power-hungry chips in future. Or so it would seem from the “as live” write-up Jon Fortt gives on his blog of the opening keynote at the Intel Developer Forum.

There also seems to be a concentration on mobile, which is sensible given that laptops are due to outnumber desktops as the preferred computing platform in the home and office by 2009. WiMax seems like it’s a technology Intel are excited about. Given that the OECD think it’s pants is very optimistic of them.

I have to appreciate these planned advances in hardware Intel lay out here. Better hardware makes better software possible. In recent years people have suggested that current hardware is “good enough” and we no longer have a need to persue Moore’s law and to add even more performance.

To those cynics, I say phooey.

Integrated graphics chipsets capable of teraflop performance, integrated WiMax and the ability to offload Blu-ray and HD processing to hardware opens up new avenues of development. Richer, more responsive, more useful environments can be built. It’s not that the hardware is “too much” but that we developers have imaginations that are too small, our thinking is too rigid. Stuck in a desktop/folder/document metaphor that is now out-dated, we seem to have resigned ourselves to not pushing boundaries.