July 21, 2016

​DeepMind AI helps Google slash datacenter energy bills

The company also claims that the new technology helps in obtaining 3.5 times the computing power from the same amount of energy input

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.

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