Nire Bryce

@NireBryce

reality is the battlefield

she/they (pl)
breadthcharge.net/

the first line goes in Cohost embeds

🐥 I am not embroiled in any legal battle
🐦 other than battles that are legal 🎮

I speak to the universe and it speaks back, in it's own way.

mastodon

email: contact at breadthcharge dot net

I live on the northeast coast of the US.

'non-functional programmer'. 'far left'.

conceptual midwife.

https://cohost.org/NireBryce/post/4929459-here-s-my-five-minut

If you can see the "show contact info" dropdown below, I follow you. If you want me to, ask and I'll think about it.

Nire Bryce @NireBryce1/10/2023, 5:11 AM

Liz Fong-Jones @lizthegrey

Liz Fong-Jones @lizthegrey12/3/2022, 6:05 AM

Sustainability of compute is a major problem (but there are solutions)

The amount of carbon emissions caused by IT may be as high as 3.8% (double the 1.9% of emissions caused by aviation). We need to grapple with our industry's role in this, rather than just saying "oh, it's been offset" and pretending like it's not a problem.

We have some of the solutions already in the form of open source build toolchains enabling us to switch to the more efficient processor architectures (ARM64 and RISC-V). Embracing these technologies can drop the carbon intensity of our compute activities by 1.5-2x with minimal changes to the software.

more from my slides presented at DDD Brisbane here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1WhQuFYpoxvbnHGyUft4XxfFgs5coyny1/view?usp=share_link

#sustainability #arm64 #netzero

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in reply to @lizthegrey's post:

Nire Bryce @NireBryce12/3/2022, 10:35 AM

a whooooole lot of offsets are essentially fake / worthless (monoculture forests in wildfire areas, re-planting somewhere that was logged with the intent to sell the land for replanting, etc) so 'it's been offset' is at best an unintentional lie in many cases

ceo of eurogaming @ceo-of-eurogaming12/3/2022, 11:22 AM

As far as I can tell, the c5.xlarge instances you were previously using where a mix of skylake and cascade lake cores. So getting quite old at this stage. Did you evaluate other options like say, newer amd or intel cores? I'm guessing since everything is running on amazon it's hard to migrate towards anything that they don't directly support, though.

It's kind of an interesting dynamic I think from a sustainability perspective. Because on one hand, upgrading to the newest architectures will absolutely improve your efficiency. But it's kind of skipping over the bit where you have to throw away all the old infrastructure to do so, and that had a non-zero cost to build in the first place.

Additionally, did you do any bare-metal performance comparisons between the machines? I'm kind of curious whether you expect a drop in performance over time as more customers begin migrating to graviton instances. Have seen that kind of thing before when testing on clouds with low utilization with GCP at least.

Liz Fong-Jones @lizthegrey12/5/2022, 3:03 AM

We've seen HUGE drops in performance on AWS Lambda when we were stretching the capacity limits of what Graviton workers were available under the hood (causing us to contend ourselves); that's part of why we had to feature flag it and only slowly increase to 100%. We don't see that problem with using EC2 instances though as Nitro is very very good in terms of virtualization overhead and when you buy X cores you actually get X cores dedicated on that machine.

There definitely is the issue of eWaste, but Amazon has already to some degree or another amortized the cost of building the stuff, they can make use of it for other things like x86 lambda, spot instances, etc. -- but fundamentally, a majority of the cost of running a space heater that happens to generate computation is the electricity rather than the space heater itself :)

At the time we did the eval of m6g, m6i and m6a were not yet available; but now the apples to apples comparison of the latest current hardware is c7g to m6i which, c7g wins hands-down. :) our experience with AMD on AWS has been very underwhelming though. We tried putting c5a into rotation against c5 and found it just couldn't keep up and tail latencies were shooting up.

ceo of eurogaming @ceo-of-eurogaming12/5/2022, 8:15 AM

Ah super cool.

It's going to be really interesting to see how arm competes with the Big Cores in the server space I think. They're still a bit behind on raw performance, but I'm interested to see how they go scaling out compared with interesting semi-custom designs compared to amd's chiplets and intel's big/little. Interesting times.

I'd like to give the gcp tau arm instances a shot at some point as well, but it's reasonably intractable at the moment to bring up arm support. :'(

Liz Fong-Jones @lizthegrey12/5/2022, 11:13 AM

Thing to remember is it's early days for ARM64 single-core performance. You can regularly find 10% wins by adding hand assembly implementations or writing compiler optimizations, whereas those discoveries don't exist on Intel these days, they're all found already.

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