I’m not downvoted at the moment, but in any case, it’s not really ‘at any cost’. Salient points from the linked report [1]:
* Data centers in the Netherlands use approx. 2% of nationwide electricity production (4% in the US [2])
* Data center electricity usage is nearly constant, while access patterns aren’t
* Even heavily used servers spend 1/3 of power usage on idle cycles, 99% for the most lightly used servers
* Power-saving modes save approx. 10% of electricity without affecting application performance
* Many respondents do not use power-saving modes because of a lack of knowledge, because they fear the consequences, or because they have been instructed not to by their sysadmin/vendor
* Nonetheless, latency-sensitive applications (e.g. HPC or HFT) are not well-suited to power-saving modes
Given these results, it seems sensible to use power-saving modes by default, unless your workload is extremely latency-sensitive.
In any case, I disagree that potential 10% electricity savings across the worldwide data center industry, without affecting application performance, are ‘environmentalism at any cost’.
* Data centers in the Netherlands use approx. 2% of nationwide electricity production (4% in the US [2])
* Data center electricity usage is nearly constant, while access patterns aren’t
* Even heavily used servers spend 1/3 of power usage on idle cycles, 99% for the most lightly used servers
* Power-saving modes save approx. 10% of electricity without affecting application performance
* Many respondents do not use power-saving modes because of a lack of knowledge, because they fear the consequences, or because they have been instructed not to by their sysadmin/vendor
* Nonetheless, latency-sensitive applications (e.g. HPC or HFT) are not well-suited to power-saving modes
Given these results, it seems sensible to use power-saving modes by default, unless your workload is extremely latency-sensitive.
In any case, I disagree that potential 10% electricity savings across the worldwide data center industry, without affecting application performance, are ‘environmentalism at any cost’.
[1, Dutch] Harryvan, D. et al. (2020). Analyse LEAP Track 1 “Powermanagement.” Rijksdienst voor Ondernemend Nederland. URL: https://www.rvo.nl/sites/default/files/2021/01/Rapport%20LEA...
[1, English] Harryvan, D. et al. (2021). Analysis LEAP Track 1 “Powermanagement.” Netherlands Enterprise Agency. URL: https://www.rvo.nl/sites/default/files/2021/01/Rapport%20LEA...
[2] Shehabi, A. et al. (2024) United States Data Center Energy Usage Report (page 5). Berkeley Lab. URL: https://eta-publications.lbl.gov/sites/default/files/2024-12...