alt Hacker NewsI'd expect someone like AWS to just throttle machines before overloading their cooling. Because they probably can do that, while e.g. a data center that just rents the space can't really throttle their customers nicely.
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AdamJacobMuller • yesterday at 10:55 PM
Its harder and harder to throttle machines with hardware segmentation capabilities effectively passing through hardware components "intact"
A decade ago it was trivial to just tell the hypervisor to reduce the cpu fraction of all VMs by half and leave half unallocated. Now, it's much more complicated and definitely would be user visible.
Reducing clock speeds, even if they could do that -- and I'm not sure they can, given how Nitro is designed -- would be problematic since a lot of customer workloads assume homogeneous nodes.
But they did load-shed. Perhaps not soon enough, but the reason this is publicly known is because they reduced the amount of heat being produced.