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Google Testing AI System To Cool Data Center Energy Bills

Posted by msmash on from the saving-power dept.

An anonymous reader writes: Google is looking at artificial intelligence technology to help it identify opportunities for data center energy savings. The company is approaching the end of an initial 2-year trial of the machine learning tool, and hopes to see it applied across the entire data center portfolio by the end of 2016. The new AI software, which is being developed at Google's DeepMind, has already helped to cut energy use for cooling by 40%, and to improve overall data center efficiency by 15%. DeepMind said that the program has been an enormous help in analyzing data center efficiency, from looking at energy used for cooling and air temperature to pressure and humidity. The team now hopes to expand the system to understand other infrastructure challenges, in the data center and beyond, including improving power plant conversion, reducing semiconductor manufacturing energy, water usage, and helping manufacturers increase throughput.

52 comments

  1. God damnit by geek · · Score: 0, Flamebait

    "Google is looking at artificial intelligence technology"

    No they are not. AI doesn't exist yet. I'm so sick of tech companies tossing this fucking AI buzzword shit around.

    1. Re:God damnit by sg_oneill · · Score: 1

      Your confusing General AI with weak AI.
      General AI we are a long way from achieving, however specialized domain specific AI is something we've been doing well for a while. We're talking things that can analyse data and make decisions not programmed into it but by using learning algorithms.

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    2. Re:God damnit by godrik · · Score: 1

      That funny because I am so sick of people complaining of the allegedly incorrect use of the word Artificial Intelligence.

      It is the correct academic term for the computing field that include data mining, machine learning, operation research, and statistics. Now, maybe Artificial Intelligence does not mean what you wish it meant. But academics are fairly clear on what it means...

    3. Re:God damnit by Drethon · · Score: 2

      So by weak AI we've had AI since the first programmable device?

    4. Re:God damnit by geek · · Score: 0, Flamebait

      That funny because I am so sick of people complaining of the allegedly incorrect use of the word Artificial Intelligence.

      It is the correct academic term for the computing field that include data mining, machine learning, operation research, and statistics. Now, maybe Artificial Intelligence does not mean what you wish it meant. But academics are fairly clear on what it means...

      Machine learning != Artificial Intelligence

      No matter how hard you try to rationalize that bullshit it doesn't make it true. It's just a bunch of jackass business people trying to sound like their company is ahead of the game with AI when the reality is that it doesnt fucking exist yet.

    5. Re:God damnit by swillden · · Score: 4, Insightful

      So by weak AI we've had AI since the first programmable device?

      No. There's a very large difference between machine learning-based systems and human-programmed systems. One very obvious one is that human-programmed systems can be explained by pointing out the specific rules that are being applied, in what order and for what reasons. With machine learning, especially the deep neural networks that are currently proving so effective, we can explain the structure of the system and the mechanisms used to "train" it, and how inputs flow through it to produce outputs, but we can't explain what logical "rules" are being applied, or when or why.

      In theory, it should be possible to derive the rules by examining the weights in the neural network. In theory, it should be possible to implement those rules with traditional, human-defined logical rules. In practice, the details of how the trained system works are usually beyond us, and typically better than we can do with explicit logic.

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    6. Re:God damnit by Drethon · · Score: 1

      Kind of sounds like the difference between traditional and cloud based servers. With traditional server you know exactly what you are dealing with, with cloud based there could be any combination of resources being used to address your needs (hopefully in the most efficient way possible). Probably the main addition being self adapting.

    7. Re:God damnit by Drethon · · Score: 1

      Also to add, IMHO, I feel like Mass Effect had a better definition with AI vs VI. AI being capable of reprogramming itself to do new and unexpected things, where as VI was constrained by its software for specific purposes and even certain limits within those purposes.

    8. Re:God damnit by 110010001000 · · Score: 2, Insightful

      LOL. There is no difference. A machine learning system is still programmed the same. It is running algorithms and rules just like any other program. People stick "neural net" in there and think that it works like neurons. Here is a hint: a neural net isn't anything like a brain. And now they just add "Deep" to the front of "neural net" or "learning" and think that is must be, like, really good now, because it is "deep" learning. We aren't any closer to AI than we were 40 years ago.

    9. Re:God damnit by 110010001000 · · Score: 1

      Computer based statistics and data mining is now AI? wow. Who knew? We used to just call them "programs".

    10. Re:God damnit by swillden · · Score: 2

      Here is a hint: a neural net isn't anything like a brain.

      There are some vague structural similarities between a neural net and the basic structure of the brain, but they're certainly very different, yes.

      And now they just add "Deep" to the front of "neural net" or "learning" and think that is must be, like, really good now, because it is "deep" learning.

      You don't have any idea what the "deep" means there, do you? It's not a content-free buzzword, it has a very specific meaning... and you might consider what the fact that you don't know what it is says about your knowledge in this space.

      We aren't any closer to AI than we were 40 years ago.

      Right. We've made, for example, no progress at all on voice recognition.

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    11. Re:God damnit by penguinoid · · Score: 1

      So what do you call artificial creations that demonstrate (limited) intelligence? No one is claiming this thing passes the Turing test.

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    12. Re:God damnit by godrik · · Score: 1

      Artificial Intelligence is a field of study, just like Algebra.

      The way ACM defines it [1], AI includes computer vision, NLP, planning, and knowledge representation and reasoning. All these tasks are today based on computational statistic/machine learning. You can also look at the last AAAI conference [2].

      The way it is defined, your GPS is an AI system.

      [1] http://dl.acm.org/ccs_flat.cfm
      [2] http://www.aaai.org/Conference...

    13. Re: God damnit by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Lot longer before that time. Back in the 19o0's just about every computer science and mathematics department were proud of their automatic class timetable program. Enter the names of the students, their courses, any other constraints and the system would crunch through all the combinations until a solution was found.

    14. Re:God damnit by angel'o'sphere · · Score: 1

      Plenty of AI is not based on 'machine learning', e.g. playing chess.

      Bottom line AI -- or what is AI -- is defined by researchers working in that topic, not by general masses.

      And so far away from 'general AI' as many people think, we aren't anyway, look e.g. at IBMs 'Watson'.

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    15. Re:God damnit by angel'o'sphere · · Score: 1

      The GPS certainly not.
      The map plotting/route finding: yes.

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    16. Re:God damnit by jellomizer · · Score: 1

      Still it isn't really AI, it is an adaptive system.
      Where it just calculates correlations from existing data and chooses what would be the more optimal solution.
      It is just more advanced than a simple workflow.

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    17. Re: God damnit by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Your personal definition of the term is apparently different to Wikipedia's and the Oxford Dictionary's.

      Do you feel like sharing what you believe it means, or would you rather continue yelling about your lawn?

  2. What were they doing before? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    It's not exactly a new problem without other solutions. Is Deep whatever really that much better? It probably just sets the thermostat to 42C.

    1. Re:What were they doing before? by ltrand · · Score: 1

      Probably not. It's most likely looking at server thermal output, server utilization, and the delta between the cold isle and the warm isle to figure out exactly how much cooling needs to be applied to what areas.

    2. Re: What were they doing before? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Exactly. That and making the thermostat more clever.

    3. Re:What were they doing before? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Since they use evaporative cooling and the article mentions humidity they're probably adjusting the thermostat to obtain the most out of the system.

    4. Re: What were they doing before? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Did you miss the part where they said they've found a better solution?

  3. And...? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Is this really so complex? I'm not seeing the amazing potential for innovation here.

    1. Re:And...? by micahraleigh · · Score: 1

      Yep. This is a long way from a Turing test.

      I wouldn't be able to tell if it were a human configuring the data center or an AI simply because of the limited chances to express agency.

    2. Re:And...? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Is this really so complex? I'm not seeing the amazing potential for innovation here.

      That's ok man, it's not super-amazing, but rather incremental management of resources.

      Boring, but practical.

      For example, Google might be able to say "Well, Datacenter A is approaching its thermal limit, but cooling it is cheaper than cooling B is, so let's do that" or some variation, like where they can sell off heated water for regional warming or something.

      Hell, I wish I could have something like this for my house, or any house, though I suspect it'd need a total redesign to work. And I'm not even willing to invest in Ductless Mini-split units, though that's also because nobody does Daiken in my area. I do wish I could just cool my work room during the day, the living room in the evenings, and the bedroom at night. I suppose if I spent the tens of thousands that Google does, it'd be worthwhile.

    3. Re: And...? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Yes maximizing the efficiency of datacenters is a very complex problem in which Google already show impressive results, being roughly 10 years in advance to the rest of the industry. Announcing such an improvement over an already state-of-the-art performance "simply" by handing-over the control from humans to machines is just amazing. And once again they announce ut at a stage where it's already in prod !

  4. Wow by sunking2 · · Score: 1

    So closed loop control is now AI.

    1. Re: Wow by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I know! Turns out I've been writing AIs for years. We just called it automation.

  5. Google Thermometer! by littlewink · · Score: 1

    Google has found another earth-shattering ML application: Google Thermometer! For a fee of only $xxxx (fill in the blanks), Google will monitor your a/c system and control it remotely! It will also accept Twitter, e-mail and messages from irritated occupants (such as Mary in Accounting, who is enduring post-menopausal heat flashes) and act (or not) upon them.

    Next Month's Fun: Google Rectal Thermometer, which will monitor your bodily functions to optimize your metabolism.

    1. Re:Google Thermometer! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Hey, if you are jealous buy your own $400 million company :O

      That should be one hella smart thermostat :)

      lol
      "We are planning to roll out this system more broadly and will share how we did it"

      Good, cause I don't even know WHAT you did....
      Article with no details and a graph that came off a late night infomercial. Yippee

  6. who cares if its 'real' AI by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Who cares if it's classic AI, if they are able to programatically able to alter their routing advertisements to take entire data centers off-line during peak-energy-cost times?

  7. The real link by OzPeter · · Score: 1

    DEEPMIND AI REDUCES GOOGLE DATA CENTRE COOLING BILL BY 40% (I can't see a fixed ink, and its DeepMind who is doing the shouting)

    It really pisses me off when I have to jump through hoops to find the actual guts of the story rather than someone else's opinion of the story.

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    1. Re:The real link by starless · · Score: 1

      Even from that link it's not clear how they actually achieve energy savings.
      There are a lot of software buzzwords, but no real description of how they can reduce
      energy consumption. ("Ye cannae change the laws of physics...")
      And the single graph has no units on the axes.

    2. Re:The real link by OzPeter · · Score: 1

      Even from that link it's not clear how they actually achieve energy savings
      There are a lot of software buzzwords, but no real description of how they can reduce
      energy consumption. ("Ye cannae change the laws of physics...")

      I agree that its light on details but at least I can get a sense of what they are doing is optimizing how and when their cooling systems run based on mining historical data for patterns that are non-obvious to humans and provide more efficient controls than simple control system feedback loops.

      And the single graph has no units on the axes.

      I don't mind the lack of units. A 40% differential between before and after shows that they are making a hell of an improvement over current systems.

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  8. This Adds to my Nest Frustration by ltrand · · Score: 1

    While this is awesome, it's light on details. I assume they loaded their datacenter with all kinds of sensors and have an advanced HVAC system that can mix external air when desired. So you look at current server load, predicted load based on past patterns, external temp, predicted external temp, along with internal temp, and then decide what air supply and cooling mix to use. So if you have CRAC units that are more advanced than on/off, and can use outside air with add/remove humidity, you can really draw down your cooling power usage.

    What is upsetting, is that this technology isn't making it's way to Nest. Nest doesn't learn, often I'm adjusting as the humidity in the house goes up or down, so I adjust the AC. It doesn't learn my patterns, it just adds in more program points, which don't always apply. Oh, and if I leave it off and need to cool it from 85 to 70, what is the estimated time? 2+. Always 2+. It never actually figures out how long it will take for any value above 2 hours. It's marketed as this "deep learning" product for home HVAC, and it really isn't. I would love to see advances in commercial HVAC controls make their way to homes, but it's just not happening.

    1. Re:This Adds to my Nest Frustration by dgatwood · · Score: 1

      While this is awesome, it's light on details. I assume they loaded their datacenter with all kinds of sensors and have an advanced HVAC system that can mix external air when desired. So you look at current server load, predicted load based on past patterns, external temp, predicted external temp, along with internal temp, and then decide what air supply and cooling mix to use. So if you have CRAC units that are more advanced than on/off, and can use outside air with add/remove humidity, you can really draw down your cooling power usage.

      I have no idea what they're actually doing with AI, but one other thing you could maybe do is improve the data center organization so that machines whose temperature spikes at the same time of day are all on the same air handler. Then again, there are limits to how far you can go in that direction without the equipment overheating, so that might not work too well. Hard to say.

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    2. Re:This Adds to my Nest Frustration by swb · · Score: 1

      Wouldn't virtualization make this pretty trivial, concentrating your workloads on hosts served by a single zone?

      As visually appealing as it is, I've kind of always wondered why so many data centers I've seen have been basically one giant room. Maybe they have some zoning control with the whole hot aisle/cool aisle concept, but it kind of seems like if they were more segmented there would be easier zoning controls and less general air mass cooling to be done.

      Although I would imagine data center cooling is an extremely complex problem with lots of hard tradeoffs.

    3. Re:This Adds to my Nest Frustration by dgatwood · · Score: 1

      Wouldn't virtualization make this pretty trivial, concentrating your workloads on hosts served by a single zone?

      Depends on what you mean. It makes reorganizing the machines pretty trivial, potentially, assuming they all have similar hardware capabilities (which may or may not be a safe assumption). But there is a cost (both in power and time) to moving large quantities of data from one machine to another, so you can't necessarily shift load around instantly, depending on what the machines are doing and how many other machines are configured to do the same job.

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    4. Re:This Adds to my Nest Frustration by swb · · Score: 1

      I'd wager that's the value of the AI analysis, sifting the performance demands across the variables -- I/O, CPU, etc -- to find patterns that indicate where you ought to home workloads, the return on migrating workloads on demand and so on.

      It may be that the metrics they had targeted previously suggested similar kinds of workload distribution merely for the power benefits of idling or spinning down nodes but without taking into account the HVAC-related aspects, resulting in fewer nodes but with no HVAC zoning priority, resulting in inefficient using of HVAC.

      I'm sure there are limits, as they have other probably more important priorities like available network bandwidth, redundancy, risk mitigation from too much concentration in a single HVAC zone, etc.

  9. The obvious by itsownreward · · Score: 1

    There's surely a Nest joke in here somewhere...

  10. We are experiencing some environmental difficultie by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    The Borg want to stay on deck 16...

  11. Take with one hand and give with the other by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    How much energy did DeepMind consume in the course of figuring this out?

  12. Cool bills? by johannesg · · Score: 1

    If they want to cool their bills, I recommend they invest in a simple fridge and stick them in there. I find it keeps my bills quite cool - if I bother to keep them in the fridge at all, of course. For some reason it only rarely happens...

  13. Here's the Source by hondo77 · · Score: 1

    Here is the DeepMind blog the article sources.

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  14. Ugh by nehumanuscrede · · Score: 1

    Scripts that watch temperature parameters doth not make an Artificial Intelligence.
    It's a sensationalized way of saying Google finally put a programmable thermostat into their data centers.

    ( " Joe wrote a script to control the AC " doesn't quite come across with the same flair now does it ? )

    When someone finally DOES give berth to a legitimate AI, we're going to have to redefine the term I think because
    comparing Google's new thermostat to a true AI system would be akin to comparing a match head to the GD Sun. :facepalm:

  15. Adaptive HVAC control by PPH · · Score: 1

    Been around for a few decades.

    Google has the advantage over office buildings, schools, etc. in that the amount of energy consumed by data centers is so large that the cost of additional sensors can be justified. And the more inputs you have, the 'smarter' your controllers can be.

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    1. Re:Adaptive HVAC control by 110010001000 · · Score: 1

      This isn't adaptive, this is "Deep Learning". VC's need to get their checkbooks out, this is the next big thing! Get on board now...you will make BILLIONS!

  16. Recursive problem? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Won't the new AI need its own data center? :)

  17. Is this deep mind application the world's fanciest by presidenteloco · · Score: 1

    "Machine that turns itself off!" ? (thus saving a lot of AI server power)

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

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  18. GOOGLE COOL SPY SHOP ERIC SCHMIDT PENTAGON by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Penta gone gone gone