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Facebook Letting Everyone See How Much Data-Center Power It Consumes

Posted by samzenpus on from the looking-at-the-numbers dept.

Nerval's Lobster writes "Facebook has added real-time dashboards for measuring the efficiency of its data centers' internal power and water use. Two dashboards monitor the company's Prineville, Ore. (here) and Forest City, N.C. data centers (here), measuring both the Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) and Water Usage Effectiveness of those facilities, in addition to the ambient temperature and humidity. So far, visitors to the Prineville and Forest City dashboards only see a limited snapshot of the Facebook data: the display only covers 24 hours, and is delayed by 2.5 hours on both sites. Facebook also hasn't disclosed how many servers the data represents, which could conceivably be used by competitors to get a sense of the social network's total computing power. The company said that once its data center in Luleå, Sweden, comes online, Facebook will begin adding data from that location, as well. Although Facebook said it provided the information out of a sense of openness, the data—showing PUEs of about 1.09 for both facilities as of press time—is a bit of a boast, as well; as recently as 2011, Uptime Institute said that the average data center's PUE was approximately 1.8. So far, Facebook hasn't said whether it will provide access to the dashboards via an API, so third parties can get a better sense of how Facebook is managing power and water use over time, and through various seasons of the year."

52 of 86 comments (clear)

  1. Number of Servers by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    Makes perfect sense they don't wanna disclose the number of servers. They like their privacy

  2. Privacy dashboard by QuietLagoon · · Score: 4, Interesting
    ... I'd rather Facebook put up a dashboard that shows how much they have been violating my privacy. I'd like to see a Facebook dashboard that is customized for me that shows, among other things:

    .
    - what data nuggets have been collected about me over the past 24 hours, week, month

    - what third party entities my data has been shared with

    I am sure that this community can suggest other items that would be useful on a Facebook Privacy Dashboard.

    In the background, I cannot shake the thought that Facebook is putting up this energy consumption dashboard for the purpose to divert attention away from Facebook's ongoing privacy issues.

    1. Re:Privacy dashboard by Literaphile · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Delete your account, stop worrying, and get some sleep.

    2. Re:Privacy dashboard by OhANameWhatName · · Score: 2

      I cannot shake the thought that Facebook is putting up this energy consumption dashboard for the purpose to divert attention away from Facebook's ongoing privacy issues

      Expect advertisements for psychological counseling the next you log in.

    3. Re:Privacy dashboard by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      Use Ghostery to escape this.

  3. Deceptive metrics by femtobyte · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Of course, "Power Usage Effectiveness" and "Water Usage Effectiveness" are somewhat deceptive metrics, because there's little useful societal "effect" produced by running Facebook's massive spyware operation. No matter how efficiently they churn out clock cycles per kWh or liter, spending those clock cycles on Facebook is an ecologically disastrous misapplication of humankind's resources. There is nothing "effective" about growing the share of the economy devoted to advertising.

    1. Re:Deceptive metrics by PSXer · · Score: 4, Insightful

      And spending time on Slashdot is a good use of humankind's resources? What is the point of even being human if we can't have a little fun every once in a while?

    2. Re:Deceptive metrics by femtobyte · · Score: 1

      I like having fun, and consider it a worthwhile use of power and water --- but I'm pretty sure there are more "effective" ways to have fun with less burden of "creepy stalker megacorporation inserting themselves into the entire fabric of your life."

    3. Re:Deceptive metrics by spire3661 · · Score: 4, Interesting

      We havent even begun to understand the positive or negative effects of the communication level Facebook allows. Like it or not, it s a HUGE hive of human activity engaging more people then any other service before. It represents hopes and fears and dreams and thoughts and loves and hates. You might hate how Facebook does things, but the actual events occurring inside are meaningful and useful to the human race.

      --
      Good-bye
    4. Re:Deceptive metrics by femtobyte · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Like you say, I might hate how Facebook does things, which is exactly what I'm doing here. New forms for fluid interpersonal communications via network channels? A-OK with me. Monetizing and commoditizing the "social network connectivity graph" to further entrench corporate power at the fundamental level of interpersonal interactions? DIAF.

    5. Re:Deceptive metrics by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      I'm pretty sure there are more "effective" ways to have fun with less burden of "creepy stalker megacorporation inserting themselves into the entire fabric of your life."

      Sent from your iPhone...

    6. Re:Deceptive metrics by VortexCortex · · Score: 2

      We havent even begun to understand the positive or negative effects of the communication level Facebook allows. Like it or not, it s a HUGE hive of human activity engaging more people then any other service before. It represents hopes and fears and dreams and thoughts and loves and hates. You might hate how Facebook does things, but the actual events occurring inside are meaningful and useful to the human race.

      I've got to problem with facebook. I don't use them though, because If anyone's monetizing my data, I want a cut. Also, every service they provide I've been using since before the Internet. Hell, my BBS had packet radio via my HAM setup -- That's country-wide mesh networking without wires. Facebook is simply the AOL of websites. It's popular and helps grandma use high tech non-features, but it's still shite to anyone with a clue.

    7. Re:Deceptive metrics by SuricouRaven · · Score: 2

      Advertising keeps the economy running. If everyone stopped buying pointless crap they don't really need or want, we'd see mass-unemployment in a year.

    8. Re:Deceptive metrics by hjf · · Score: 1

      Protests against the government of Argentina last night, largely organized via Facebook and other social networks:

      http://clarincomhd.tumblr.com/image/48316699321

      Does this give you a sense of scale, about the level of communication people can have on Facebook?

    9. Re:Deceptive metrics by femtobyte · · Score: 1

      Strangely, mass protests are documented to have existed in history well before Facebook arrived --- however did they do it? Indeed, Facebook served as a communication channel for facilitating this protest. However, Facebook's ability to track, record, analyze, and sell the participants' data did not help. Nor would a profiteering megacorporation (with its own friendly FBI ties) be an advantageous ally in organizing protests against the powers closer to Facebook's empire.

    10. Re:Deceptive metrics by femtobyte · · Score: 1

      People don't need 20% of the entire economy (rough estimate, hard to make precise; there is more cost to advertising than direct TV/radio/Facebook expenditures; there is also wasteful effort put into packaging, just-for-selling-points R&D, higher prices for inferior goods with better advertising, monopolization and barrier to entry in markets, etc.) dedicated to "making them buy shiny new stuff" --- they'd still buy plenty if they could. We already see mass unemployment, because the middle class doesn't have as much money left to buy stuff after wealth has been accumulating upwards for several decades (not because they've become less needy/wanty). Advertising is an "arms race" situation: every company needs more and more bigger advertising to keep ahead of their competitors, not to assure that people will buy something with their money. The result is massive economic inefficiency, disguised in plain sight.

    11. Re:Deceptive metrics by kwbauer · · Score: 1

      Which companies are "making" you buy their products?

      I know mine is an unpopular opinion, but corporations are groups of people united for the purpose of producing and selling. People have the right (at least in the US) to speak freely and that includes enticing others to buy their products. We generally refer to that as advertising.

      Would you rather the government controlled every bit of information you are allowed to see?

    12. Re:Deceptive metrics by femtobyte · · Score: 1

      Pay attention to the thread above; my statement about "making you buy stuff" wasn't a complaint that some company is forcing me to buy stuff through advertising --- it was a response to the parent poster above claiming people would magically stop wanting to buy things if advertising was cut back. Thus, my point was that companies don't make people buy things with advertising --- they'd be buying things anyway.

      As for corporate free speech in advertising: I support free speech. That doesn't mean I support what everyone is saying, and won't speak out counter to people who are saying things I think are wrong and harmful to society. I think the massive allocation of resources to marketing is wrong and harmful; I speak out against it. I think that while folks should have free speech to talk about whatever they like, that corporate advertising gets unequal and unfair access to the "microphone" at the expense of everyone else: the megacorporate voice, representing the interests of the fraction-of-1% at the top, controls an overwhelming share of the public's "platforms for speech" (the media, the airwaves, the internet) because they've got money. Level the playing field and let the 1% have their 1% of the shouting, and the 99% their 99%.

      And where the heck did you get the idea that I'd "rather the government controlled every bit of information you are allowed to see"?

    13. Re:Deceptive metrics by hjf · · Score: 1

      Nice troll, but most people here are familiar only with facebook, and the odd one who uses Twitter.

    14. Re:Deceptive metrics by hjf · · Score: 1

      I think mass protests were largely local events. The 19 and 20 of december of 2001 we had massive protests (much smaller than the current ones) that ended with then-president De La Rua resigning. Those protests were held in Buenos Aires and only 1 channel was showing them until people called the other news networks about how big it was and they were shit because they weren't showing them. Hours later all channels were covering these events. Once that happened, the protests replicated all over the country, but at a much smaller scale.

      This is different now: people are able to communicate directly, without the media filters. The protests started all over the country at the same time. 12 years ago that would have been just impossible since much less people had internet access back then.

      THAT is the power of people communicating with each other. Regardless of FBI nosiness or not.

    15. Re:Deceptive metrics by hjf · · Score: 1

      No, they haven't. Very few people used a dating site called "badoo", and the first relevant social network was Facebook. Myspace wasn't even a thing over here.

  4. Where? by PSXer · · Score: 1

    The amount of data center power consumed would sure be an interesting statistic, but it isn't anywhere in the link. The only two metrics listed other than the publicly available weather are PUE = [Total Building Load (kWh)] / [IT Load (kWh)] and WUE = [Volume of water required to condition data hall air (liters)] / [IT load (kWh)].

  5. Not real time by theduk3 · · Score: 2

    The dashboard is not actually in real-time, but carries a 2.5 hour delay.

    1. Re:Not real time by rvw · · Score: 1

      The dashboard is not actually in real-time, but carries a 2.5 hour delay.

      That's it! I want my money back!!!

  6. What a strange world we live in... by fearofcarpet · · Score: 5, Insightful

    ...where a giant company worth billions--just because people in suits say so--is building state-of-the-art data centers around the globe to store crappy photos of mundane activities and asinine conversations about nothing in order to collect data on consumers for advertisers so they can sell them more gadgets to take even crappier photos of even more mundane activities. (And yes, I'm aware of the irony of appearing on television in order to decry it, so don't bother pointing that out.) Meanwhile the funding agencies that drive the creation of all this technology are being gutted to shave a few fractions of a percent off of the federal budget, Wikipedia is begging users for cash, and NASA had to scrap its shuttle program. Our priorities are a joke.

    --
    Actually, I wrote my thesis on life experience.
    1. Re:What a strange world we live in... by tyrione · · Score: 2

      ...where a giant company worth billions--just because people in suits say so--is building state-of-the-art data centers around the globe to store crappy photos of mundane activities and asinine conversations about nothing in order to collect data on consumers for advertisers so they can sell them more gadgets to take even crappier photos of even more mundane activities. (And yes, I'm aware of the irony of appearing on television in order to decry it, so don't bother pointing that out.) Meanwhile the funding agencies that drive the creation of all this technology are being gutted to shave a few fractions of a percent off of the federal budget, Wikipedia is begging users for cash, and NASA had to scrap its shuttle program. Our priorities are a joke.

      Spot on.

    2. Re:What a strange world we live in... by cervesaebraciator · · Score: 1

      This is not television.

      Well I'm certainly not going to pay enough for it to be HBO.

    3. Re:What a strange world we live in... by DNS-and-BIND · · Score: 1

      Gosh, it's almost like people can do anything they want. Even if you (for various values of "you") find that it's wrong. Hey, buck up, a good tyranny would erase all these negative things and we can go back to presenting people with only "positive" (for various values of positive) options.

      --
      Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
    4. Re:What a strange world we live in... by Meneth · · Score: 2

      This is a world where we have finally become rich enough to be able to do these things. Still silly, from the perspective of us who do not care for the frivolous things, but since the majority of the population do care for them, we should not be surprised.

    5. Re:What a strange world we live in... by hjf · · Score: 1

      the majority of people in the WORLD doesn't use facebook (alleged: 1 billion people out of 7 billion)

  7. Will deleting change anything? by tuppe666 · · Score: 2

    Delete your account, stop worrying, and get some sleep.

    Its off topic (but a more interesting topic) Although having read about it you have to *delete* the account which allegedly will remove it, but deactivate your account and messages you sent, may still be visible to others. they also save your timeline information (ex: friends, photos, interests, etc.)

    But even then you have companies like http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/feb/10/software-tracks-social-media-defence like this one who mine data...and create links. Not sure how you delete their data, or even find out who has it.

    ...now this stuff is so cool, you can track people who are not on facebook, by the content of others on facebook,, by your family, friends, hell your work/school probably has a few pages, more than enough to create a full profile of you, an estimated one anyway.

    Deleting you account is the tip of the iceberg...an illusion of privacy at best.

    1. Re:Will deleting change anything? by lister+king+of+smeg · · Score: 4, Interesting

      if you change you age to under 12 facebook nukes you account from orbit or so i am given to understand.

      --
      ---Saying gnome 3 is better than windows 8 not so much a compliment as it is damning with light praise.
    2. Re:Will deleting change anything? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      You can't change your Facebook age to below twelve if you never were on Facebook.

    3. Re:Will deleting change anything? by kwbauer · · Score: 2

      If you never opened a Facebook account, then Facebook CANNOT have violated your privacy. There is no way that Facebook is running bots collecting data from everyone's computer and such. That means that if you never told Facebook about yourself, then it was your friends and family that did so and they are the ones that violated your privacy, not Facebook.

    4. Re:Will deleting change anything? by zhaobao9988 · · Score: 1

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  8. Tagged "whocares" by philip.paradis · · Score: 2

    I take an extremely accepting view of what might qualify as "news for nerds," but this absolutely fails the "stuff that matters" test. Honestly, who the hell cares about this? It's a cheap stunt, and nothing more.

    --
    Write failed: Broken pipe
    1. Re:Tagged "whocares" by Kawahee · · Score: 2

      I take an extremely accepting view of what might qualify as "news for nerds," but this absolutely fails the "stuff that matters" test.

      As some other commentator noted, those phrases appear to be being removed from the Slashdot site. Hit CTRL+F and try and find them.

      --
      I'll subscribe to Slashdot when I see a month without a dupe, a typo, or an article the "editors" didn't read.
    2. Re:Tagged "whocares" by philip.paradis · · Score: 1

      Fair enough. I suppose I've just become so accustomed to the presence of those words (since about 2000 I guess) that I missed their absence. I'll continue to lower my expectations accordingly.

      --
      Write failed: Broken pipe
    3. Re:Tagged "whocares" by jones_supa · · Score: 1

      I heard from a recent Dice meeting that the proposed new slogan is "random shit 4 u, yo".

    4. Re:Tagged "whocares" by l_bratch · · Score: 1

      The text persists in the head within a link title:

      <link rel="top" title="News for nerds, stuff that matters" href="//slashdot.org/" >

      But it does indeed seem to be gone from any normally viewable place, sadly.

    5. Re:Tagged "whocares" by eastlight_jim · · Score: 1

      It's also still there in the title tags:

        <title>Slashdot: News for nerds, stuff that matters</title>

      However, since many browsers, especially those on Windows, dropped the title bar for more viewable screen area, it's often not shown. It does flash up for a few hundred milliseconds in the tab text in FF on Windows but is rapidly replaced with "Slashdot".

    6. Re:Tagged "whocares" by l_bratch · · Score: 1

      You're quite right. I was only looking in the HTML for this thread, but it's still in the title for the the main homepage.

  9. So timely! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    I, for one, was up ALL NIGHT worrying about how much power they were consuming, and how efficient they were. I was just getting ready to write my congressman about it. Facebook really anticipated my concern here! it's like they read my mind, or my email!

    Uh oh.

  10. Here's wondering... by Black+Parrot · · Score: 1

    How much extra power is this going to use?

    --
    Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
  11. Here by jones_supa · · Score: 1

    Two dashboards monitor the company's Prineville, Ore. (here) and Forest City, N.C. data centers (here)

    Why add a separate word "here" just for the link? That part could have been written like:

    Two dashboards monitor the company's Prineville, Ore. and Forest City, N.C. data centers

    Much neater.

  12. Doesn't show power consumption by gnu-sucks · · Score: 3, Informative

    This doesn't show power consumption. It only shows ratios that are considered a sort of measure of efficiency.

    It's like showing "miles per gallon" instead of "gallons used". In the case of facebook, they may be driving at 40 MPG, but they drive a million miles a day and that's a lot of fuel!

  13. U.K. National Grid Status by Alain+Williams · · Score: 1

    Bah! Just the power consumption of some uninteresting company, here is the real time power consumption of an entire country.

  14. Terrible Visualization by necro81 · · Score: 2

    I wonder what Edward Tufte would have to say about these graphs. Instead of nice orderly graphs with a straightline X and Y axis, they implemented them as circular graphs, on polar axes, where amplitude is radial and time is angle. There is something to be said for "now" always being up at 12 o'clock. Then again, it might have been nice for the "now" to sweep across the face in time with the local hour. The appearance mimics the circular pen plots you might see on old temperature and humidity monitors.

    On the other hand, they failed at one of the axioms of data presentation: they didn't provide scale for their axes. The human eye/brain isn't that good at judging radial amplitude, just like it isn't good at discerning logarithmic amplitude (which is why we have log plots: to linearize it). Down in the corner they mention that the circle represents the past 24 hours, but they aren't any graduations on the graph (e.g., 1-hour tick marks). Because the graph represents 24 hours instead of 12, our usual sense of time:angle from analog clocks is off by a factor of two. If you look at it long enough, you can work it out, but a good data representation shouldn't require that. If you hover over a particular measure (e.g., PUE), it'll hide the other traces (a nice touch, perhaps), and will show you the scale minimum and maximum. But, again, because it is a polar plot without gridlines, it's damn near impossible to read and figure out, say, what the PUE was 5 hours ago.

    Oh, but wait, they added a cursor, so that you can roll it back to a certain time and get the values. How very clever! I'll bet the 20-year old intern that implemented that got an awesome pat on the back and course credit for industrial design. But it doesn't negate the fact that a good data visualization should be self-evident: you look at it and immediate see what's going on. You shouldn't need to "query" the graph by interacting with it; it should stand alone.

    Would an ordinary X-Y plot, with gridlines, really have been that difficult, or cramped their precious design that much?

    1. Re:Terrible Visualization by TheSkepticalOptimist · · Score: 1

      Actually, I thought it was quite clever.

      You must be a senior, or at least act like you're a senior because you can't stand anything thats different.

      It took me about 3.2 seconds to understand how it works.

      --
      I haven't thought of anything clever to put here, but then again most of you haven't either.
    2. Re:Terrible Visualization by Cramer · · Score: 1

      I guess you've never seen a chart recorder? There was one on the wall in the lab where I worked (many a year ago) at NCSU -- used to be a thermal test lab. We also had them all over the place in the hatchery my grandparents ran (many decades ago.) The rotating chart is a very efficient means of recording one or more readings continuously without using a huge roll of paper.

      (google "temperature chart recorder")

    3. Re:Terrible Visualization by necro81 · · Score: 1

      The rotating chart is a very efficient means of recording one or more readings continuously without using a huge roll of paper

      I am familiar with those (see the last sentence of my first paragraph). Yes, they are efficient in terms of the resulting record (a disc of paper with lots of data on it) and the mechanism (a pair of motors), but few would claim they are all that good in terms of readability. And, I'll note, they all have gridlines printed on them, so that you can actually read the data afterwards. For a dashboard such as Facebook is trying to implement, you don't have those same constraints: you can produce a very readable display just as easily as a crap one.

  15. Facebook: a Network Effect virus by justthinkit · · Score: 1
    The Network Effect was heralded. Everyone on /. benefited from it for years, even decades. Little did we know there would come a time when a virus would ruin everything. The Facebook virus.
    .

    [In the middle of writing this post, my SO wanted me to "unfriend" some supreme PoS. No visible way to do this. Search Google. Go to this Facebook help page, appropriately called "How do I unfriend or remove a friend?". In attempting to follow the 3 simple steps, I go to that person's Facebook page and attempt to hover over their FRIENDS button. Of course they are not showing one. Back to Google. Follow this new link...interesting how Facebook says it is a 3 step process (that doesn't work, and requires *#&%^ Javascript) and the wikihow page says it is an 8-step process that involves finding the person on _your_ FRIENDS list. Not easy to find the FRIENDS list, even on your own page. Turns out it is under "Edit your profile". Bring up my SO's list of friends. Un-frigging-sorted! Can you believe that?! Captain A-hole is not there. Walk away furious...]

    Last word from me on the subject, for today: Facebook needs to shrivel up and die.

    --
    I come here for the love