Quanta magazine describes an "explosion of interest" in what they're calling algorithms with predictions, arguing that machine learning tools "have, in a real way, rejuvenated research into basic algorithms." Machine learning and traditional algorithms are "two substantially different ways of computing, and algorithms with predictions is a way to bridge the two," said Piotr Indyk, a computer scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. "It's a way to combine these two quite different threads...." In the past few years, researchers have shown how to incorporate algorithms with predictions into scheduling algorithms, chip design and DNA-sequence searches.

In addition to performance gains, the field also advances an approach to computer science that's growing in popularity: making algorithms more efficient by designing them for typical uses.... By ignoring the worst-case scenarios, researchers can design algorithms tailored to the situations they'll likely encounter. For example, while databases currently treat all data equally, algorithms with predictions could lead to databases that structure their data storage based on their contents and uses....

[M]ost of these new structures only incorporate a single machine learning element. Tim Kraska, a computer scientist at MIT, imagines an entire system built up from several separate pieces, each of which relies on algorithms with predictions and whose interactions are regulated by prediction-enhanced components.

"Taking advantage of that will impact a lot of different areas," Kraska said.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Register: Last year, the Graph Foundation had to rethink how it develops and distributes its Open Native Graph Database (ONgDB) after it settled a trademark and copyright claim by database biz Neo4j. The Graph Foundation agreed [PDF] it would no longer claim specific versions of ONgDB, its Neo4j Enterprise Edition fork, are a "100 percent free and open source version" of Neo4J EE. And last month, two other companies challenged by Neo4j -- PureThink and iGov -- were also required by a court ruling to make similar concessions.

ONgDB is forked from Neo4j EE, which in May 2018 dropped the GNU Affero General Public License (AGPL) and adopted a new license that incorporates the AGPLv3 alongside additional limitations spelled out in the Commons Clause license. This new Neo4j EE license forbade non-paying users of the software from reselling the code or offering some support services, and thus is not open source as defined by the Open Source Initiative. The Graph Foundation, PureThink, and iGov offered ONgDB as a "free and open source" version of Neo4j in the hope of winning customers who preferred an open-source license. That made it more challenging for Neo4j to compete.

So in 2018 and 2019 Neo4j and its Swedish subsidiary pursued legal claims against the respective firms and their principals for trademark and copyright infringement, among other things. The Graph Foundation settled [PDF] in February 2021 as the company explained in a blog post. The organization discontinued support for ONgDB versions 3.4, 3.5 and 3.6. And it released ONgDB 1.0 in their place as a fork of AGPLv3 licensed Neo4j EE version 3.4.0.rc02. Last May, the judge hearing the claims against PureThink, and iGov granted Neo4j's motion for partial summary judgment [PDF] and forbade the defendants from infringing on the company's Neo4j trademark and from advertising ONgDB "as a free and open source drop-in replacement of Neo4j Enterprise Edition" The defendants appealed, and in February the US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit affirmed a lower court decision that the company's "statements regarding ONgDB as 'free and open source' versions of Neo4j EE are false." "Stop saying Open Source when it's not," said the Open Source Initiative in a blog post. "The US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit recently affirmed a lower court decision concluding what we've always known: that it's false advertising to claim that software is 'open source' when it's not licensed under an open source license."

Microsoft brought DirectStorage to Windows PCs this week. The API promises faster load times and more detailed graphics by letting game developers make apps that load graphical data from the SSD directly to the GPU. Now, Nvidia and IBM have created a similar SSD/GPU technology, but they are aiming it at the massive data sets in data centers. From a report: Instead of targeting console or PC gaming like DirectStorage, Big accelerator Memory (BaM) is meant to provide data centers quick access to vast amounts of data in GPU-intensive applications, like machine-learning training, analytics, and high-performance computing, according to a research paper spotted by The Register this week. Entitled "BaM: A Case for Enabling Fine-grain High Throughput GPU-Orchestrated Access to Storage" (PDF), the paper by researchers at Nvidia, IBM, and a few US universities proposes a more efficient way to run next-generation applications in data centers with massive computing power and memory bandwidth. BaM also differs from DirectStorage in that the creators of the system architecture plan to make it open source.

"A little noticed side effect of all the sanctions Russia is under for its invasion of Ukraine is that related to IT," writes Slashdot reader quonset. "U.S. sanctions prohibit any technology transfers to the country, including computer chips. However, another issue is Russia is now cut off from cloud storage companies in the West. As a result, Russia is two months away from using up all its domestic storage capacity. Four options have been proposed to counter this issue. BleepingComputer reports: Last week, the Ministry of Digital Development amended the Yarovaya Law (2016) to suspend a yearly requirement for telecom operators to increase storage capacity allocations by 15% for anti-terrorist surveillance purposes. Another move that could free up space would be to demand ISPs abandon media streaming services and other online entertainment platforms that eat up precious resources. Thirdly, there's the option of buying out all available storage from domestic data processing centers. However, this will likely lead to further problems for entertainment providers who need additional storage to add services and content. Russia is also considering seizing IT servers and storage left behind by companies who pulled out of Russia and integrating them into public infrastructure. There is one more option mentioned in the report and it has to do with China. Russia could "tap into Chinese cloud service providers and IT system sellers," reports BleepingComputer, although China has yet to decide how much it's willing to help Russia.

Microsoft has finally released its DirectStorage API to game developers. This means one of the most promising features of the Xbox Series X is coming to the PC. From a report: DirectStorage promises to bring faster loading times thanks to optimized NVMe SSD accesses. Previously, a game could only perform one in/out access at a time. This didn't present any issues in the days of hard drives, but now that most gaming PC's have SSDs that can transfer gigabytes per second with hundreds of thousands of in out operations per second (IOPS) it's clear that a better method was needed. Enter DirectStorage. DirectStorage lets an NVMe SSD to reach its full performance potential by allowing multiple I/O operations concurrently. It allows assets to be transferred directly to the GPU, leading to better efficiency.

On February 24, Russian forces seized control of the Chernobyl nuclear plant and took its staff hostage, causing radiation levels to increase about 20-fold from all the heavy military vehicles stirring contaminated soil in the exclusion zone surrounding the plant. Today, the Ukrainian government warned that the abandoned nuclear power plant, including other nuclear facilities nearby, no longer have electricity after a power line was damaged. Axios reports: A loss of power at the plant could disrupt the cooling of radioactive material stored there, risking radioactive leakage that can be carried by wind to other parts of Europe. [...] "About 20,000 spent fuel assemblies are stored in the spent nuclear fuel storage facility-1. They need constant cooling, which is possible only if there is electricity. If it is not there, the pumps will not cool. As a result, the temperature in the holding pools will increase," the Ukrainian government said. "After that evaporation will occur, that will lead to nuclear discharge. The wind can transfer the radioactive cloud to other regions of Ukraine, Belarus, Russia and Europe. In addition, there is no ventilation inside the facility," it added.

The International Atomic Energy Agency said Wednesday that Ukraine had informed it of the power outage and called it a violation of a "key safety pillar" but saw "no critical impact on safety" in this case. The agency's director general said Tuesday that it was no longer receiving data monitoring systems installed at the plant and other facilities and that the handling of nuclear material in the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone had been put on hold. "I'm deeply concerned about the difficult and stressful situation facing staff at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant and the potential risks this entails for nuclear safety. I call on the forces in effective control of the site to urgently facilitate the safe rotation of personnel there," IAEA director general Rafael Mariano Grossi said Tuesday.

The Ukrainian government is preparing for the potential need to move its data and servers abroad if Russia's invading forces push deeper into the country, a senior cybersecurity official told Reuters on Wednesday. From the report: Victor Zhora, the deputy chief of Ukraine's State Service of Special Communications and Information Protection, emphasized his department was planning for a contingency, but that it is being considered at all suggests Ukrainians want to be ready for any Russian threat to seize sensitive government documents. The move could only happen after regulatory changes approved by Ukrainian lawmakers, Zhora said.

Government officials have already been shipping equipment and backups to more secure areas of Ukraine beyond the reach of Russian forces, who invaded on Feb. 24 and are laying siege to several cities. Last month Zhora told Politico there were plans to move critical data out of the capital Kyiv should it be threatened, but preparations for potentially moving data abroad go a step further. Ukraine has received offers to host data from a variety of countries, Zhora said, declining to identify them. For reasons of proximity "a European location will be preferred," he said.

Zhora gave few details of how such a move might be executed, but he said past efforts to keep government data out of Russia's grasp involved either the physical transport of servers and removable storage devices or the digital migration of data from one service or server to another. Government agencies would have to decide on a case by case basis whether to keep their operations running inside the country or evacuate them. [...] Russia possessing Ukrainian government databases and intelligence files could be helpful if Russia wanted to control Ukraine.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Another European privacy watchdog has sanctioned the controversial facial recognition firm, Clearview AI, which scrapes selfies off the Internet to amass a databased of some 10 billion of faces to power an identity-matching service it sells to law enforcement. Italy's data protection agency today announced a [roughly $22 million] penalty for breaches of EU law -- as well as ordering the controversial company to delete any data on Italians it holds and banning it from any further processing of citizens' facial biometrics. Its investigation was instigated following "complaints and reports," it said, noting that as well as breaches of privacy law it found the company had been tracking Italian citizens and people located in Italy.

"The findings revealed that the personal data held by the company, including biometric and geolocation data, are processed illegally, without an adequate legal basis, which certainly cannot be the legitimate interest of the American company," the Garante said in a press release. Other General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) breaches it identified included transparency obligations (on account of Clearview not having adequately informed users of what it was doing with their selfies); violations of purpose limitation and having used user data for purposes other than those for which they were published online; and also breaches of data retention rules with no limit on storage. "Clearview AI's activity therefore violates the freedoms of the data subjects, including the protection of confidentiality and the right not to be discriminated against," the authority also said. CEO Hoan Ton-That said in a statement: "Clearview AI does not have a place of business in Italy or the EU, it does not have any customers in Italy or the EU, and does not undertake any activities that would otherwise mean it is subject to the GDPR."

Ton-That added: "We only collect public data from the open internet and comply with all standards of privacy and law. I am heartbroken by the misinterpretation by some in Italy, where we do no business, of Clearview AI's technology to society. My intentions and those of my company have always been to help communities and their people to live better, safer lives."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Interesting Engineering: Green Hydrogen International (GHI) has unveiled its plans to build a 60 GW green hydrogen production facility near the Piedras Pintas salt dome in Texas. The facility will be the largest of its kind in the world, the company claimed in a press release. While the world seeks cleaner alternatives to the energy that can power long-haul flights and stand in as a substitute for natural gas, green hydrogen appears to be one of the front runners. With countries such as China, Saudi Arabia, Chile, Spain having initiated green hydrogen projects on a pilot basis, GHI would have to make a big splash to announce its arrival.

The company is hopeful that its proposed plant, capable of producing 2.5 billion kilograms of green hydrogen every year, will do exactly that. According to its website, GHI has seven projects that are under development with a combined output of one terawatt. The largest and the first one to get off the ground is Hydrogen City in Texas. Using onshore wind and solar energy, the project aims to produce 60 gigawatts of green hydrogen every year. The Piedras Pintas salt dome in Duval County will serve as the hydrogen storage facility for the project which in its initial stages will see a 2-gigawatt production facility being drawn up. Green hydrogen production is expected to begin by 2026 and it will tap into renewable energy from the Texan electricity grid. Green hydrogen produced at the facility will be piped to the coastal city of Corpus Christi and Brownsville, where industries will convert them to other products. "Hydrogen City is a massive, world-class undertaking that will put Texas on the map as a leading green hydrogen producer," GHI's founder and CEO Brian Maxwell said. "Texas has been the world leader in energy innovation for over 100 years and this project is intended to cement that leadership for the next century and beyond."

"Every day, several petabytes of data are generated on the internet," says Kasra Tabatabaei, a researcher at the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology. "Only one gram of DNA would be sufficient to store that data."

So the Institute is now announcing the results of a project Tabatabaei worked on "to transform the double helix into a robust, sustainable data storage platform." CNET reports: Tabatabaei is the co-author of a new study, published in last month's edition of the journal Nano Letters... Essentially, the study team is the first to artificially extend the DNA alphabet, which could allow for massive storage capacities and accommodate a pretty extreme level of digital data.... DNA encodes genetic information with four molecules called nucleotides. There's adenine, guanine, cytosine and thymine, or A, G, C and T. In a sense, DNA has a four-letter alphabet, and different letter combinations represent different bits of data....

But what if we had a longer alphabet? Presumably, that'd give us a much deeper capacity. Following this line of thought, the team behind the new study artificially added seven new letters to the DNA repertoire.... "Instead of converting zeroes and ones to A, G, C and T, we can convert zeroes and ones to A, G, C, T and the seven new letters in the storage alphabet."
One of the study's co-principal investigators said their work "provides an exciting proof-of-principle demonstration of extending macromolecular data storage to non-natural chemistries, which hold the potential to drastically increase storage density in non-traditional storage media."

Electrek writes: Nearly a year ago, Electrek reported that scientists published a feasibility study about the benefits of erecting solar panels over canals. That study is about to become a reality in a [one-mile] pilot project in California.

The California Department of Water Resources, utility company Turlock Irrigation District, Marin County, California-based water and energy project developer Solar AquaGrid, and The University of California, Merced, are partnering on a pilot project named Project Nexus — a "nod to the water-energy nexus paradigm gaining attention among public utilities."
California has about 4,000 miles of canal transporting water to 35 million California, explains Roger Bales, a distinguished engineering professor at the University of California, Merced (who is working on the project). "It's the largest such system in the world.

"We estimate that about 1% to 2% of the water they carry is lost to evaporation under the hot California sun." In a 2021 study... we showed that covering all 4,000 miles of California's canals with solar panels would save more than 65 billion gallons of water annually by reducing evaporation. That's enough to irrigate 50,000 acres of farmland or meet the residential water needs of more than 2 million people....

Shading California's canals with solar panels would generate substantial amounts of electricity. Our estimates show that it could provide some 13 gigawatts of renewable energy capacity, which is about half of the new sources the state needs to add to meet its clean electricity goals: 60% from carbon-free sources by 2030 and 100% renewable by 2045.

Installing solar panels over the canals makes both systems more efficient. The solar panels would reduce evaporation from the canals, especially during hot California summers. And because water heats up more slowly than land, the canal water flowing beneath the panels could cool them by 10 degrees Fahrenheit, boosting production of electricity by up to 3%.

These canopies could also generate electricity locally in many parts of California, lowering both transmission losses and costs for consumers. Combining solar power with battery storage can help build microgrids in rural areas and underserved communities, making the power system more efficient and resilient. This would mitigate the risk of power losses due to extreme weather, human error, and wildfires....

Another benefit is curbing aquatic weeds that choke canals. In India, where developers have been building solar canals since 2014, shade from the panels limits growth of weeds that block drains and restrict water flow....

Building smart solar developments on canals and other disturbed land can make power and water infrastructure more resilient while saving water, reducing costs, and helping to fight climate change.
"The project is anticipated to break ground in fall 2022," writes Turlock Irrigation District, "and be complete by the end of 2024."

Banana Pi has revealed a new board resembling the Raspberry Pi Computer Module 3. According to Tom's Hardware, it features a powerful eight-core processor, up to 8GB of RAM and 32GB eMMC. Additional features like ports will require you to connect it to a carrier board. From the report: At the core of the Banana Pi board is a Rockchip RK3588 SoC. This brings together four Arm Cortex-A76 cores at up to 2.6 GHz with four Cortex-A55 cores at 1.8 GHz in Arm's new DynamIQ configuration - essentially big.LITTLE in a single fully integrated cluster. It uses an 8nm process. The board is accompanied by an Arm Mali-G610 MP4 Odin GPU with support for OpenGLES 1.1, 2.0, and 3.2, OpenCL up to 2.2, and Vulkan1.2. There's a 2D graphics engine supporting resolutions up to 8K too, with four separate displays catered for (one of which can be 8K 30FPS), and up to 8GB of RAM, though the SoC supports up to 32GB. Built-in storage is catered for by up to 128GB of eMMC flash. It offers 8K 30fps video encoding in the H.265, VP9, AVS2 and (at 30fps) H.264 codecs.

That carrier board is a monster, with ports along every edge. It looks to be about four times the area of the compute board, though no official measurements have been given. You get three HDMIs (the GPU supports version 2.1), two gigabit Ethernet, two SATA, three USB Type-A (two 2.0 and one 3) one USB Type-C, micro SD, 3.5mm headphones, ribbon connectors, and what looks very like a PCIe 3.0 x4 micro slot. The PCIe slot seems to breakout horizontally, an awkward angle if you are intending to house the board in a case. Software options include Android and Linux.

From news reports and social media posts to Ukraine University and government websites, archivists are in a mad dash to preserve the country's online history. From a report: As the Russian invasion of Ukraine accelerates, professional and hobbyist archivists alike are rushing to preserve Ukraine's online history, cataloging and storing everything from Ukrainian government and university websites, to the torrent of news and social media posts related to the accelerating conflict. The Internet Archive has been archiving the broader conflict in Ukraine since 2014. But as Ukraine government websites face prolonged outages due to sustained cyber attack -- as well as the looming risk of defacement or deletion -- the organization has taken on another monumental task: backing up the entirety of the Ukrainian Internet.

Using the crowdsourced auto-archiving software running on a virtual machine they've dubbed Archive Team Warrior, the organization has leveraged volunteers around the world, many of whom have donated countless terabytes of storage capacity for the project. These volunteers have been steadily backing up the Ukrainian Internet since before the war began. All told, 68 million items (web pages, documents, and other files) comprising more than 2.5 TB of data have already been hoovered up from various websites across the .ua top level Ukrainian domain. A second project dubbed Ukr-net aims to preserve tens of millions of additional items and terabytes of additional data across the Ukrainian Internet. Elsewhere, organizations like the Center For Information Resilience have built a crowdsourced map attempting to document every single war-related post to social media made in the region, ranging from civilian photos of the movement of heavy Russian weaponry, to Ukranian government claims of alleged bombing raids on kindergardens.

The U.S. is far behind its global rivals in the race for energy supremacy in a low-carbon world. To catch up, it is pinning its hopes on companies such as Ion Storage Systems, a next-generation battery company started in a University of Maryland chemistry lab with a $574,275 federal grant. WSJ: At a new factory outside of Washington, D.C., Ion Storage will be among the first companies in the U.S. to produce a new kind of faster-charging, longer-lasting battery. The company's batteries also don't catch fire; combustibility is a problem that has bedeviled the industry's batteries for years. The U.S. government and private investors have poured cash into battery startups hoping to catch up to the Chinese, Japanese and South Korean companies that dominate battery manufacturing. The goal is to leapfrog their rivals with better technology.

There is an urgency for U.S. battery makers to get products to market because big customers such as auto makers are lining up long-term suppliers. If there are no U.S. options, the buyers will go abroad. "This is our last chance to get it right" in the U.S., said Ricky Hanna, Ion Storage's chief executive and the former executive director of battery operations at Apple. [...] The company is one of several startups focusing on solid-state lithium-ion batteries. These batteries differ from most lithium-ion batteries today because the electrolyte that conducts a charge between cathode and anode is solid, rather than a flammable liquid. That allows faster charging, less risk of fire and longer battery life. Ion Storage scientists demonstrate their batteries' durability by cutting them open with scissors or putting them before an open flame.

"Volkswagen AG has lost hope that many of its roughly 4,000 vehicles aboard a cargo ship that caught fire last week in the Atlantic can be saved," Bloomberg reported Friday, citing estimates that the total cargo loss for the Felicity Ace could exceed a third of a billion dollars.

"The blaze is believed to have lasted more than a week after the Panama-flagged ship's crew members were evacuated and it was left adrift." VW's Golf compact cars and ID.4 electric crossovers were among the vehicles aboard the ship, according to an internal email last week from the automaker's U.S. operation. Headquartered in Wolfsburg, Germany, the group manufactures cars under brands including VW, Porsche, Audi and Lamborghini — all of which were on the ship.
Earlier this week Qz.com argued that the fire was being fueled by lithium-ion batteries. Slashdot reader McGruber shared their report: It's not clear if the batteries contributed to the fire starting in the first place — a greasy rag in a lubricant-slicked engine room or a fuel leak are the usual suspects in ship fires — but the batteries are keeping the flames going now.

A forensic investigation will take months to determine the cause. [Last] Saturday, João Mendes CabeÃas, captain of the port of Faial, the nearest Azorean island, told Reuters that the batteries in the ship's cargo are "keeping the fire alive...." Large quantities of dry chemicals are needed to smother lithium ion battery fires, which burn hotter and release noxious gases in the process. Pouring water onto the Felicity Ace wouldn't put out a lithium-ion battery fire, CabeÃas told Reuters, and the added water weight could make the ship more unstable.

Electric vehicle fires are rare, but pose their own kind of flammability risk, and one that becomes heightened as EVs go mainstream. Large numbers of EVs grouped together, as when they are transported by cargo ship, or electric buses parked in an overnight lot, raise the risk that one flaming battery could ignite a chain reaction in adjacent batteries. According to a research proposal at the National Academy of Sciences' Transportation Research Board, "Lithium-ion battery fire risks are currently undermanaged in transit operations."

There have been more than 35 large lithium-ion battery fires since 2018, Paul Christensen, an expert in lithium fires, told the Financial Times, including a 13-ton Tesla megapack storage battery in Victoria Australia that burned for three days. An electric ferry in Norway caught fire in 2019, and in April 2021, a battery fire at a Beijing mall killed two firefighters.

In addition, car-carrying ships and ferries can face higher risks from fires, according to insurer Allianz Global's head of marine risk. Due to the internal areas not being divided to make it easier to transport cars, when a fire starts it can spread more easily.

DidgetMaster writes: Hard drive costs now hover around $20 per terabyte (TB). Drives bigger than 20TB are now available. Fast SSDs are more expensive, but the average user can now afford these in TB capacities as well. Yet, we are still using antiquated file systems that were designed decades ago when the biggest drives were much less than a single gigabyte (GB). Their oversized file records and slow directory traversal search algorithms make finding files on volumes that can hold more than 100 million files a nightmare. Rather than flexible tagging systems that could make searches quick and easy, they have things like "extended attributes" that are painfully slow to search on. Indexing services can be built on top of them, but these are not an integral part of the file system so they can be bypassed and become out of sync with the file system itself.

It is time to replace file systems with something better. A local object store that can effectively manage hundreds of millions of files and find things in seconds based on file type and/or tags attached is possible. File systems are usually free and come with your operating system, so there seems to be little incentive for someone to build a new system from scratch, but just like we needed the internet to come along and change everything we need a better data storage manager.

See Didgets for an example of what is possible. In a Substack article, Didgets developer Andy Lawrence argues his system solves many of the problems associated with the antiquated file systems still in use today. "With Didgets, each record is only 64 bytes which means a table with 200 million records is less than 13GB total, which is much more manageable," writes Lawrence. Didgets also has "a small field in its metadata record that tells whether the file is a photo or a document or a video or some other type," helping to dramatically speed up searches.

Do you think it's time to replace file systems with an alternative system, such as Didgets? Why or why not?

"Thousands of Texans who have turned to solar power and battery storage, creating so-called microgrids, as a solution to blackouts," reports the Houston Chronicle.

"With a venture creating the same little power plants for apartment buildings, Texas has become a national leader in residential solar power installations." From 2019 to 2020, small-scale solar capacity in Texas grew by 63 percent, to 1,093 megawatts from 670 megawatts, according to the Energy Information Administration. In the first three quarters of 2021, another 250 megawatts of residential solar were installed in the state, according to the Solar Energy Industries Association. In last year's third quarter alone, Texas ranked second behind California in the amount of power from new installations during the period, the industry's Washington, D.C. trade group said.

Surging demand for residential solar power in Texas after the February 2021 freeze put pressure on installers to keep up, said Abigail Hopper, president and CEO of the association. The race to buy new rooftop panels has slowed some, she said, but Texas remains among the top three states for new installations. And the shrinking price of solar cells will help support its growing popularity, Hopper said.

"I think as more and more Americans really struggle with the impact of severe weather — everything from fires, the cold, hurricanes, droughts — and see the impacts on power and power outages, you're going to continue to see folks looking for resiliency," Hopper said.

"Around this time last year, millions of Texans were shivering without power during one of the coldest spells to hit the central United States," remembers the Washington Post. "For five days, blackouts prevented people from heating their homes, cooking or even sleeping. More than 200 people died in what is considered the nation's costliest winter storm on record, amounting to $24 billion in damages.

"Twelve months later, the state's electrical grid, while improved, is still vulnerable to weather-induced power outages." "If we got another storm this year, like Uri in 2021, the grid would go down again," said Andrew Dessler, a professor of atmospheric sciences at Texas A&M University. "This is still a huge risk for us."

Now, a recent study shows that electricity blackouts can be avoided across the nation — perhaps even during intense weather events — by switching to 100 percent clean and renewable energy, such as solar, wind and water energy. "Technically and economically, we have 95 percent of the technologies we need to transition everything today," said Mark Jacobson, lead author of the paper and professor of civil and environmental engineering at Stanford University. Wind, water and solar already account for about one fifth of the nation's electricity, although a full transition in many areas is slow.

The study showed a switch to renewables would also lower energy requirements, reduce consumer costs, create millions of new jobs and improve people's health....

The team found the actual energy demand decreased significantly by simply shifting to renewable resources, which are more efficient. For the entire United States, total end-use energy demand decreased by around 57 percent. Per capita household annual energy costs were around 63 percent less than a "business as usual" scenario.... In Texas, a complete green transition would reduce the annual average end-use power demand by 56 percent. It also reduces peak loads, or the highest amount of energy one draws from the grid at a time. Jacobson said many homes would also have their own storage and wouldn't need to rely on the grid as much.

The team also found interconnecting electrical grids from different geographic regions can make the power system more reliable and reduce costs. Larger regions are more likely to have the wind blowing, the sun shining or hydroelectric power running somewhere else, which may be able to help fill any supply gaps. "The intermittency of renewable energy declines as you look at larger and larger areas," said Dessler. "If it's not windy in Texas, it could be windy in Iowa. In that case, they could be overproducing power and they could be shipping some of their extra power to us." The study stated costs per unit energy in Texas are 27 percent lower when interconnected with the Midwest grid than when isolated, as it currently is.
Interestingly, long-duration batteries aren't important for grid stability. the team found, since our current 4-hour batteries can just be connected for longer-term storage. Professor Dessler tells the Post we should think of "renewables" as a system which includes storage technology and easily-dispatchable energy solutions.

And the Post adds that a grid powered by renewables "would also produce cleaner air, which could reduce pollution-related deaths by 53,000 people per year and reduce pollution-related illnesses for millions of people in 2050."

A recent post on the AWS Open Source blog announced that AWS "is investing in the sustainability of Rust, a language we believe should be used to build sustainable and secure solutions."

It was written by the chair of the Rust foundation (and leader of AWS's Rust team) with a Principal Engineer at AWS, and reminds us that Rust "combines the performance and resource efficiency of systems programming languages like C with the memory safety of languages like Java."

But there's another reason they're promoting Rust: Worldwide, data centers consume about 200 terawatt hours per year. That's roughly 1% of all energy consumed on our planet... [C]loud and hyperscale data centers have been implementing huge energy efficiency improvements, and the migration to that cloud infrastructure has been keeping the total energy use of data centers in balance despite massive growth in storage and compute for more than a decade... [I]s the status quo good enough? Is keeping data center energy use to 1% of worldwide energy consumption adequate..? [Will] innovations in energy efficiency continue to keep pace with growth in storage and compute in the future? Given the explosion we know is coming in autonomous drones, delivery robots, and vehicles, and the incredible amount of data consumption, processing, and machine learning training and inference required to support those technologies, it seems unlikely that energy efficiency innovations will be able to keep pace with demand...

[J]ust like security, sustainability is a shared responsibility. AWS customers are responsible for energy efficient choices in storage policies, software design, and compute utilization, while AWS owns efficiencies in hardware, utilization features, and cooling systems.... In the same way that operational excellence, security, and reliability have been principles of traditional software design, sustainability must be a principle in modern software design. That's why AWS announced a sixth pillar for sustainability to the AWS Well-Architected Framework. What that looks like in practice is choices like relaxing service-level agreements for non-critical functions and prioritizing resource use efficiency. We can take advantage of virtualization and allow for longer device upgrade cycles. We can leverage caching and longer times-to-live whenever possible. We can classify our data and implement automated lifecycle policies that delete data as soon as possible. When we choose algorithms for cryptography and compression, we can include efficiency in our decision criteria.

Last, but not least, we can choose to implement our software in energy efficient programming languages.

There was a really interesting study a few years ago that looked at the correlation between energy consumption, performance, and memory use.... What the study did is implement 10 benchmark problems in 27 different programming languages and measure execution time, energy consumption, and peak memory use. C and Rust significantly outperformed other languages in energy efficiency. In fact, they were roughly 50% more efficient than Java and 98% more efficient than Python. It's not a surprise that C and Rust are more efficient than other languages. What is shocking is the magnitude of the difference. Broad adoption of C and Rust could reduce energy consumption of compute by 50% — even with a conservative estimate....

No one developer, service, or corporation can deliver substantial impact on sustainability. Adoption of Rust is like recycling; it only has impact if we all participate. To achieve broad adoption, we are going to have to grow the developer community.
That "interesting study" cited also found that both C and Rust execute faster than other programming languages, the blog post points out, so "when you choose to implement your software in Rust for the sustainability and security benefits, you also get the optimized performance of C."

And the post also notes Linus Torvalds' recent acknowledgement that while he really loves C, it can be like juggling chainsaws, with easily-overlooked and "not always logical" type interactions. (Torvalds then went on to call Rust "the first language I saw which looked like this might actually be a solution.")

The Rust Foundation is a non-profit partnership between Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google, Huawei, Microsoft, and Mozilla.

AnandTech reports: It's no secret that Intel's enterprise processor platform has been stretched in recent generations. Compared to the competition, Intel is chasing its multi-die strategy while relying on a manufacturing platform that hasn't offered the best in the market. That being said, Intel is quoting more shipments of its latest Xeon products in December than AMD shipped in all of 2021, and the company is launching the next generation Sapphire Rapids Xeon Scalable platform later in 2022. Beyond Sapphire Rapids has been somewhat under the hood, with minor leaks here and there, but today Intel is lifting the lid on that roadmap.

Currently in the market is Intel's Ice Lake 3rd Generation Xeon Scalable platform, built on Intel's 10nm process node with up to 40 Sunny Cove cores. The die is large, around 660 mm2, and in our benchmarks we saw a sizeable generational uplift in performance compared to the 2nd Generation Xeon offering. The response to Ice Lake Xeon has been mixed, given the competition in the market, but Intel has forged ahead by leveraging a more complete platform coupled with FPGAs, memory, storage, networking, and its unique accelerator offerings. Datacenter revenues, depending on the quarter you look at, are either up or down based on how customers are digesting their current processor inventories (as stated by CEO Pat Gelsinger). Further reading: Intel Arc Update: Alchemist Laptops Q1, Desktops Q2; 4M GPUs Total for 2022.