Google’s $500 million purchase of DeepMind has reportedly helped the company slash the energy it uses to cool its datacenters by 40 percent.
The DeepMind-powered savings on cooling have resulted in an overall 15 percent reduction in its datacenters’ PUE (power usage effectiveness), a measure of how much energy is used by IT as a proportion of the total energy used by a building.
Over the past few months, DeepMind’s researchers have helped Google’s datacenter team develop a system of neural networks that are trained using data from its facilities’ various sensors.
DeepMind co-founder, Demis Cassabas, stated :
We accomplished this by taking the historical data that had already been collected by thousands of sensors within the data center — data such as temperatures, power, pump speeds, setpoints, etc and using it to train an ensemble of deep neural networks.
Google considers its DeepMind power savings a rare and major breakthrough in its mission to becoming 100 percent clean-powered. It said that tackling cooling requirements is incredibly difficult due to the complex ways that industrial equipment such as pumps, chillers, and cooling towers respond to different, constantly-changing, and unpredictable conditions, such as weather changes. Additionally, each of its datacenters has a different architecture, making it more challenging to rollout one answer for all facilities.
However, the algorithm has only been tested in a live environment in one facility. Google says it plans to apply the technique to other datacenter challenges in months to come.