Google Just Put an AI in Charge of Keeping Its Data Centers Cool (zdnet.com)

Google is putting an artificial intelligence system in charge of its data center cooling after the system proved it could cut energy use. From a report: Now Google and its AI company DeepMind are taking the project further; instead of recommendations being implemented by human staff, the AI system is directly controlling cooling in the data centers that run services including Google Search, Gmail and YouTube. "This first-of-its-kind cloud-based control system is now safely delivering energy savings in multiple Google data centers," Google said. Data centers use vast amount of energy and as the demand for cloud computing rises even small tweaks to areas like cooling can produce significant time and cost savings. Google's decision to use its own DeepMind-created system is also a good plug for its AI business. Every five minutes, the AI pulls a snapshot of the data center cooling system from thousands of sensors. This data is fed into deep neural networks, which predict how different choices will affect future energy consumption.

Comments

I have an AI at home, too

[Sooner Boomer]

It's called a THERMOSTAT

and no, it's not connected to the internet.

Re: I have an AI at home, too

[Anonymous Coward]

humans emit heat...

Bzzzt!

I'm sorry Dave,
  you must stay at room temperature,
for the good of the Servers.

Dave ?

Dave ?

Re:I have an AI at home, too

[The Original CDR]

"The more they overthink the plumbing, the easier it is to stop up the drain." - Scotty (Star Trek 5)

Re:I have an AI at home, too

[Anonymous Coward]

"The more they overthink the plumbing, the easier it is to stop up the drain." - Scotty (Star Trek 3)

FTFY

Re:I have an AI at home, too

[jbengt]

Well, they definitely think about the plumbing in prisons over what they think about plumbing in single family homes, but that's to think about how to prevent the drains from being stopped up. (Prisons have been known to put in vacuum drains, provide overrides at the guard stations to stop flushing, etc.)

Re:I have an AI at home, too

[jbengt]

I don't disagree that better control can save energy, or that learning algorithms can help find more optimal solutions. Still, even with 1,000s of sensors (which many buildings already have in their BAS) you don't need AI to control HVAC. Considering they claim 40% energy savings, I doubt that the only change they made is adding an "AI" to the controls. Sounds more like they allowed greater temperature swings and higher temperatures in general.

Re:I have an AI at home, too

[AvitarX]

I assume that's exactly what they did.

If some areas could be a couple degrees warmer ambient, and it doesn't mess up any of the internal sensors heat, the AI let is slide.

It can be response to subtle changes in a way that a person or traditional temperature settings couldn't be.

Additionally, it can likely move the physical location of cloud things predicatively in a way that would be hard for humans (I assume this counts as part of temperature control), or maybe keep an area with more things running if if means another area can use air cooling only.

Re: I have an AI at home, too

[Type44Q]

...an AI

One would almost think the writer was quoting Gibson except this is ZDNet so literacy is quite ruled out.

Re:I have an AI at home, too

[K. S. Kyosuke]

Maybe it was supposed to be

"All I can say is, they don't make 'em like they used to." - Scotty (Star Trek 5)

?

Re:I have an AI at home, too

[The Original CDR]

I stand corrected. However, the quote really does apply to Star Trek 5: The Final Bomb.

The data center became self-aware

[filesiteguy]

Next it will be instructing us lowly humans to build new data centers so we can keep ourselves cool.

Re:The data center became self-aware

[Anonymous Coward]

Data centers are basically industrial buildings, so optimizing their layouts and location considering cooling, costs of building, and in generally optimizing in terms of functional inputs and outputs of the facility considering all relevant parties is just a data collection issue these days. That building optimization was done by hand in the 70's, so maybe a neural net in combination of other modules could perform such a feat in scale today, if put together in the right way. Combinations of systems have been performing sub-optimally in security field, so maybe there is something still to learn here.

The Real Thing

[Anonymous Coward]

Controlling heat dissipation in Google Data Centers and keep them cool it's a far greater responsibility than winning a Dota 2 game.

Good bye, datacenter staff.

[Anonymous Coward]

I never liked you.

Next up: DevOps. I don't like you either.

Really?

[pilaftank]

> âoeachieve a 40 percent reduction in the amount of energy used for coolingâ Yeah, right. Seems unlikely unless they are also using blockchain.

a cheaper solution

[slashmydots]

Just let about a dozen cats loose in the building and they'll automatically find the warmest spots to snuggle up and take a nap on. Then you add more fans or whatever to that area. That costs basically nothing and cats are provably smarter than AI.

Re:a cheaper solution

[Oswald McWeany]

Just let about a dozen cats loose in the building and they'll automatically find the warmest spots to snuggle up and take a nap on. Then you add more fans or whatever to that area. That costs basically nothing

You've not met my cats!!!! Vet bills are not free!

and cats are provably smarter than AI.

You've not met my cats!!!

Re: a cheaper solution

[TimMD909]

Found the antihistamine lobbyist. How much did they have to pay to get to you?

Re:a cheaper solution

[d0rp]

I imagine cat hair clogging up the air intakes on the servers would become an issue...

Re:a cheaper solution

[Anubis IV]

The older I get, the more I interact with cats, and the more examples I see of cats behaving erratically in response to various forms of stimuli (e.g. putting tape on their backs or sides, using a clip on the nape of their neck, their reaction to stationary cucumbers, etc.), the more convinced I become that cats are actually incredibly dumb. What we interpret as aloofness is actually just their inability to comprehend what's going on using a brain that amounts to little more than randomly-firing neurons.

Mind you, I like cats, but, man, they're dumb.

Re:a cheaper solution

[mikael]

Our cats would seek out the laptop keyboards, behind a desktop PC, on a hot water bottle and any chair that someone had just been sitting on.

Re:a cheaper solution

[K. S. Kyosuke]

Just let about a dozen cats loose in the building

Cats?

100% efficiency

[supernova00]

So what happens when the AI decides the best way to keep everything cool is to shut everything down so it doesn't prodcue heat thus needing to be cooled in the first place? 100% efficiency

Re:100% efficiency

[jbengt]

Nah, that would be true AI. This is just marketing-speak "AI".

Re:100% efficiency

[Fly Swatter]

Because it is an algorithm, nothing is AI.

Cool?

[sconeu]

What's the Megafonzie rating of the AI?

You mean algorithm?

[schklerg]

Seriously - it's an algorithm. It may be a more gooder one fed by sensor data, but it can only be deemed intelligence in the same way a report is intelligence. So tired of this buzzword.

Re:You mean algorithm?

[Jeremi]

An algorithm would be an explicit sequence of steps for a computer to perform, typically designed and written for it by a human programmer.

This system, on the other hand, was never handed a program to run to figure out how to best keep energy costs down -- instead it was given example data and a learning algorithm, and applied the latter to the former to generate a useful neural network.

But the neural network itself is not an algorithm, except in an uninteresting academic sense, because it was not explicitly designed by a human being, and (if successful) it will outperform any known human-designed algorithm by a substantial margin. And that, regardless of what terminology you want to use to describe it, is what is novel and newsworthy about the project.

Re:You mean algorithm?

[Trogre]

Look, the word "software" has fallen out of favour in 2018 - it's now either an app or an AI.

This clearly isn't an app, so...

Re:You mean algorithm?

[thegarbz]

Seriously - it's an algorithm.

No it's not. It is actually the exact opposite.

How is this AI?

[Anonymous Coward]

if (temp_sensor > some_value) { turnACOn(); }

How is this any different than how my computer controls its internal fans ? Ok, maybe over time, the system "learns" how to be a PID controller by knowing how it overreacted the last time a particular sensor was a particular value and eventually eliminates any kind of "rippling" effect.

But this is not AI. Stop calling it AI. Fucking marketing wanks

about the only type of job AI is good for

[iggymanz]

So the worry-wart slashdotter was right, "A"I put thousands out of work. Thousands of older model thermostats, haha.

Of course anything this "deep think" AI is doing could have been done 60+ years ago with an analog computer, you tards know that right?

I for one find it...

[nospam007]

Cool!

Things worked fine until...

[LordHighExecutioner]

...the AI realized that power consumption could be further reduced by shutting off the system where the AI program was running.

Comment

[WallyL]

Pffft. That's nothing. In 2014 I started using an AI to control my services. They call it... systemd!

now THATs smart

[sdinfoserv]

do
if (temp(x)> 26) then ( ac.run(1) )
while

Let's throw in a Google Home to make it look cool and trendy.....

Re:How is this artificial intelligence?

[gweihir]

Every stupid demented thing is "AI" these days, because too many people believe in magic....

Thermostats vs an actual solution

[OrangeTide]

You set upper and lower bounds ad the thermostat engages heat or AC if the ambient temperature goes outside the set limits. I fail to see what AI adds to this.

I take it your thermostat doesn't route job orders in a large cluster to avoid sending work to hot cabinets?

Only controlling the A/C doesn't sound so useful to me. At least if I'm trying to optimize for most processing done per unit of electricity.

Re:Thermostats vs an actual solution

[rnturn]

You set upper and lower bounds ad the thermostat engages heat or AC if the ambient temperature goes outside the set limits. I fail to see what AI adds to this.

I take it your thermostat doesn't route job orders in a large cluster to avoid sending work to hot cabinets?

No but it wouldn't be rocket science to make the temperature available to whatever software is routing jobs. You have been able to send jobs to lightly loaded hosts, cluster members, what-have-you, for a long time. Adding the cabinet temperature to the logic wouldn't be terribly difficult:

if ( ( load < load_max ) and ( ambient_temp < temp_max ) ) then AcceptJob else print "We're closed. Try next door."

You could add the local cost of electrical power into the mix as well to send the work to a locale where the rates are lower today. Nifty but I hope this isn't what they're calling AI nowadays.

Downside: See the other Slashdot article about how Amazon is gaming the electrical grid to divert the cost of running their data centers onto the poor schlubs who live near them.

Re:Thermostats vs an actual solution

[OrangeTide]

Downside: See the other Slashdot article about how Amazon is gaming the electrical grid to divert the cost of running their data centers onto the poor schlubs who live near them.

I think the articles are related because electricity costs is such a huge factor for cloud computing. You can try and use less energy, or you can try and make someone else pay your bills.

I suspect it will quickly be cheaper for the cloud industry to outsource all the datacenters outside of the US and EU to places with cheap electricity and little to no government regulation. Then all you need to do is lay some fat network, much cheaper than a power generator, and use smaller front-end server to help hide some latency.

Re:Thermostats vs an actual solution

[mikael]

There are privacy regulations and law that relate to the security of personal data across networks and the location of servers.

Re:Thermostats vs an actual solution

[OrangeTide]

In the US? laws were made to be broken, or overturned by bought politicians. Maybe applicable in the EU.

Butter robot

[bosef1]

I feel sorry for this AI that's its purpose for existing is to run the A/C for a data center. I'm reminded of the Butter Robot from Rick and Morty.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X7HmltUWXgs

Is this a bad idea?

[fish_sauce]

I wonder if Google could save more money by building data centers in the arctic.