From smartphone assistants to image recognition and translation, machine learning already helps us in our everyday lives. But it can also help us to tackle some of the world’s most challenging physical problems -- such as energy consumption.
Large-scale commercial and industrial systems like data centres consume a lot of energy, and while much has been done to, there remains a lot more to do given the world’s increasing need for computing power. Reducing energy usage has been a major focus for us over the past 10 years: we have built our own at Google, invented and invested heavily in, with the goal of being powered 100 percent by renewable energy.
Compared to five years ago, we now get around 3.5 times the computing power out of the same amount of energy, and we continue to make many improvements each year. Major breakthroughs, however, are few and far between -- which is why we are excited to share that by applying DeepMind’s machine learning to our own Google data centres, we’ve managed to reduce the amount of energy we use for cooling by up to 40 percent. In any large scale energy-consuming environment, this would be a huge improvement. Given how sophisticated Google’s data centres are already, it’s a phenomenal step forward. The implications are significant for Google’s data centres, given its potential to greatly improve energy efficiency and reduce emissions overall. This will also help other companies who run on Google’s cloud to.
While Google is only one of many data centre operators in the world, many are not powered by renewable energy as we are. Every improvement in data centre efficiency reduces total emissions into our environment and with technology like DeepMind’s, we can use machine learning to consume less energy and help address one of the biggest challenges of all -- climate change. One of the primary sources of energy use in the data centre environment is cooling. Just as your laptop generates a lot of heat, our data centres -- which contain servers powering Google Search, Gmail, YouTube, etc. -- also generate a lot of heat that must be removed to keep the servers running. This cooling is typically accomplished via large industrial equipment such as pumps, chillers and cooling towers.
However, dynamic environments like data centres make it difficult to operate optimally for several reasons: • The equipment, how we operate that equipment, and the environment interact with each other in complex, nonlinear ways. Traditional formula-based engineering and human intuition often do not capture these interactions. • The system cannot adapt quickly to internal or external changes (like the weather). This is because we cannot come up with rules and heuristics for every operating scenario. • Each data centre has a unique architecture and environment.