> What people are trying to tell you is you can’t make having a glut of equipment work out for any reason, let alone environmental.
Google has a glut of equipment for two reasons: variable loads and experimental.
The batch loads are predictable and constrained by input rate. What the coal ends up used for is spikes in demand for compute power (i.e. "Michael Jackson died and now everyone needs to watch Thriller right now") and ceiling to develop and experiment with new projects.
This optimization means that while, yes, the fossil fuel resources would be feeding those use cases, it's a net gain because those use cases are less common than the predictable batch-job work.
> You are so overprovisioned in fact that someone will steal your promotion by pointing this out to your boss, which is also a pretty big cost.
Remember the context. Nobody ever got fired at Google for adding more compute power to the behemoth, because it's all fungible and will all be used eventually. if you're trying to argue "Google is a net polluter because they continue to build machines in a fashion only bounded by land and hardware costs under the assumption more compute power is always better than less" it's an argument you could make but (a) you should factor in the carbon offsets they buy and (b) you're tipping close to arguing "All human activity is pollution; kill the species."
Google has a glut of equipment for two reasons: variable loads and experimental.
The batch loads are predictable and constrained by input rate. What the coal ends up used for is spikes in demand for compute power (i.e. "Michael Jackson died and now everyone needs to watch Thriller right now") and ceiling to develop and experiment with new projects.
This optimization means that while, yes, the fossil fuel resources would be feeding those use cases, it's a net gain because those use cases are less common than the predictable batch-job work.
> You are so overprovisioned in fact that someone will steal your promotion by pointing this out to your boss, which is also a pretty big cost.
Remember the context. Nobody ever got fired at Google for adding more compute power to the behemoth, because it's all fungible and will all be used eventually. if you're trying to argue "Google is a net polluter because they continue to build machines in a fashion only bounded by land and hardware costs under the assumption more compute power is always better than less" it's an argument you could make but (a) you should factor in the carbon offsets they buy and (b) you're tipping close to arguing "All human activity is pollution; kill the species."