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toast0today at 5:07 AM2 repliesview on HN

> Electricity is a small fraction, and it's not like datacenters are just going to shut down their servers when they're not in use.

I don't have any insight on modern GPU datacenters, but in decades past, some owned and operated datacenters didn put effort into making sure power management worked because the cost savings were worth it. I'm pretty sure I saw plans to shed load and power off servers if a utility made a demand response request or in case of loss of cooling. I wouldn't be surprised if some owned and operated data centers do regular full shutdowns at off peak... WOL, IPMI or RTC wakeup can bring them back when needed and if you already have a dynamic service orchestrator and setup times are acceptable, why not shut down if there's no actual priority work and there's also no idle priority opportunistic load either...


Replies

huslagetoday at 7:58 AM

No one does this. There is zero value, economic or otherwise, in turning off machines.

essephtoday at 8:21 AM

I've never heard of anybody shitting a DC down off peak. Been around 30yr or so.

> why not shut down if there's no actual priority work and there's also no idle priority opportunistic load either...

Full shutdown and startup often kills capacitors and used to be dangerous for rotational HDD.

Sometimes once you turn things off, they simply don't come back on. It happens.