No, we need massive data centers for LLMs and data analysis for targeted ads /s
Comment on As Data Centers Proliferate, Illinois Communities Grapple with How to Supply the Necessary Water
belit_deg@lemmy.world 6 days 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
jim3692@discuss.online 6 days ago
drosophila@lemmy.blahaj.zone 6 days 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.
Master167@lemmy.world 6 days ago
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?
belit_deg@lemmy.world 6 days 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.
calcopiritus@lemmy.world 6 days ago
Is a connection between 3+ people still p2p? Or is there another term for it?
I don’t know how this would work over the internet though.
On a LAN you could use multicast, but I don’t think ISPs support multicast, it seems like it would be an easy way to DoS. But I honestly don’t know.
So, if you can’t multicast, the way to have serverless multi-user video calls would be to have a separate video feed for each receiver, which I can see using more resources than through a server that would replicate the stream to all the receivers. Of course this is dependant on distance, even without multicast it consumes more resources if everyone is in the same LAN.
belit_deg@lemmy.world 6 days ago
There can be an unlimited no. of connections (peers). Remember the bittorrent days, where you could seed to and download files from many peers simultaneously? You can do the same with data streams, f.ex. video and audio. Try Keet if you want to see a practical example. We don’t need data centres for video conferences or calls.