As Data Centers Proliferate, Illinois Communities Grapple with How to Supply the Necessary Water. "This isn’t reused wastewater. This is drinking water”

a year ago by Davriellelouna to c/technology

Computing facilities require lots of water to operate, putting the burden of allocating resources on municipalities.

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belit_deg 18 points a year ago

How about reducing our dependence on data centres by using software that is more peer to peer and local first etc?

Of course some data centres have legitimate use cases, such as big data analysis on weather and climate data etc, but building huge data centres for social media and running everything in the cloud is silly from an environmental perspective

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drosophila 13 points a year ago

Distributed computing would eliminate the water usage, since the heat output wouldn't be so highly concentrated, but it would probably somewhat increase power consumption.

In an ideal world I think data center waste heat would be captured for use in a district thermal grid / seasonal thermal energy store like the one in Vantaa.

Of course that isn't to say that we shouldn't be thinking about whether we're using software efficiently and for good reasons. Plenty of computations that take place in datacenters serve to make a company money but don't actually make anyone's lives better.

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Master167 2 points a year ago

In an ideal world I think data center waste heat would be captured for use in a district thermal grid / seasonal thermal energy store like the one in Vantaa.

Yes, this would be the ideal for dealing with that issue. Re-use that heat to generate some of the energy the data center is demanding.

Imagine there’s an engineering & physics issue to be solved. But where would we find those top talent people to solve it?

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belit_deg 1 point a year ago

If I'm having a video meeting p2p instead of microsoft teams running in the cloud, that would reduce power consumption, not increase it.

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jim3692 1 point a year ago

No, we need massive data centers for LLMs and data analysis for targeted ads /s

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