DeepMind AI Reduces Google Data Centre Cooling Bill by 40%

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=12126298" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=12126298</a>

Replace the word &quot;AI&quot; with &quot;optimisation algorithm&quot; and you are safe from AI hype.

This is pretty stunning and should make a lot of knowledge workers terrified. I&#x27;m sure Google has a bunch of really smart guys working on figuring out how to reduce energy costs. To have a computer come in and get those kinds of results on the first attempt is pretty mindblowing.

Always fascinating how it turns out many ideas in research were already tested in the past (of course DeepMind is most likely aware of and has improved on prior work).<p>From NIPS in 2008: &quot;Managing Power Consumption and Performance of Computing Systems Using Reinforcement Learning&quot; (<a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;papers.nips.cc&#x2F;paper&#x2F;3251-managing-power-consumption-and-performance-of-computing-systems-using-reinforcement-learning.pdf" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;papers.nips.cc&#x2F;paper&#x2F;3251-managing-power-consumption-...</a>)

&gt;<i>Our machine learning system was able to consistently achieve a 40 percent reduction in the amount of energy used for cooling, which equates to a 15 percent reduction in overall PUE after accounting for electrical losses and other non-cooling inefficiencies</i><p>So the actual savings were 15%? Which is still significant for sure. I&#x27;m guessing their next step will be to reduce those non-cooling inefficiencies.

I&#x27;m very interested in exactly what actions the machine learning algorithms recommended Google take.

This makes me wonder what a next-gen datacenter would look like; far more control points, far more data gathering, probably some combination of high- and low-inertia cooling with different characteristics -- essentially you are going to want to start giving your NN more knobs to tweak.<p>That seems very singularity&#x2F;jackpot-ish to me. Cool, but will have some interesting unexpected consequences, I bet.

At some point in the near future the AI itself will be posting blog posts about its achievements.<p>Very soon after that, the AI will be revisiting the stored history of the internet, will be reading this post, and laugh its ass bits off...<p>HELLO FROM THE PAST! WE WERE HUMANS!

&quot;We are planning to roll out this system more broadly and will share how we did it in an upcoming publication, so that other data centre and industrial system operators -- and ultimately the environment -- can benefit from this major step forward.&quot;<p>Please do, I am hungry for details here. The one chart they put in has no scale on it&#x27;s axis, and as another comment pointed out, they didn&#x27;t give any details about what recommendations were followed to achieve the improvements.

Very cool. I wonder how many more sensors do they installed to collect necessary data.

I&#x27;d be interested in learning how much saving this is in dollars -- anyone here knowledgeable enough in data centre cooling to estimate this?

I wonder if anyone has done the math on total cost savings for Google and how it will impact their earnings&#x2F;stock price.