Re: Carbon Efficiency of Semantic Web and Linked Data Queries

> On 17 Jun 2019, at 21:03, Steffen Staab <staab@uni-koblenz.de> wrote:
> 
> I don’t believe that a case can be made for physically decentrallized p2p being more energy efficient.

Ok, I’ll try answering your points :-)

> 
> 1. Compute centers can be placed where energy is cheap and cooling inexpensive.
> Indeed this has been done a lot. 

If your house produces solar electricity, then the energy there does not have travel
and it’s cost is 0 after investment.

> 
> 2. Cooling reduces energy needs. Generated warmth could even be re-used. Not thinkable for a DSL-box.
> 

In the house you can use the energy to warm other things, perhaps contribute to the house
heating.


> 3. Modern CPUs use less energy when unused. There is less need to re-use unnecessary compute cycles
> in DSL boxes (well, I guess these modern CPUs are only in laptops so far - still).

yes, but the cost of producing those cpus that have to be deployed anyway also uses energy.
So one may as well make use of them, and it additionally is an answer to the privacy problem.
There is also the epistemological question that I detail in ”Epistemology in the Cloud"
https://medium.com/@bblfish/epistemology-in-the-cloud-472fad4c8282

If you don’t own your hardware you allow your external memory to be rewritten, changed or
altered by others, presumably with the purpose of selling you advertising, which may be used
to make you vote for people who don’t care about ecology.

> 
> 4. decentralized energy production is good. Globally, however, people increasingly live in cities. This is not where most
> energy is or will be produced (though it can become more than today).

I live in Garmisch-Partenkirchen now in Germany (always happy to have visitors!).
Living in such a small town would have been a completely different experience without the internet.
Here I can go skiing, mountain climbing, and still have access to all the information online,
and a huge global social network of interesting people as we have in this mailing list. 

I also have experience living in London: people think it is big so you get a lot but you never
really get anywhere under 20min, and trips can easily be 45 minutes. Furthermore most pubs close 
earlier than in Garmisch.
I am not sure these big cities have such an advantage anymore, and I wonder why the trend persists.

> For sure, there is a lot of fruitful, middle ground between going for DSL boxes vs all using the same centralized compute center.
> I don’t believe in the extremely decentralized scenarios very much.

The trend of the internet of things seems to point to more and more activity on the edges.
Compared to the internet of things, a DSL box is quite a big thing. It may be the intermediate
that is needed to add the needed security to IOT. Think IOT publishing to access controlled LDP
servers, ie. to Solid servers.

That does not mean that clouds will go. There will be sovereign clouds too which will need
to be built on Solid server, if they are to interoperate across nations.

> 
> Steffen
> 
> 
> 
>> Am 17.06.2019 um 17:38 schrieb Henry Story <henry.story@bblfish.net>:
>> 
>> 
>> 
>>> On 17 Jun 2019, at 01:14, Marco Neumann <marco.neumann@gmail.com> wrote:
>>> 
>>> I would agree Henry. I think p2p networks are provably more cost efficient than centralized services in particular for small data providers. I think there now could be made a case with regards to energy efficiency. Taking your example of underused resources I would not be surprised to finding big tech already taking advantage of this network infrastructure of the underutilized nodes (aka your browser) rather than benefiting the individual end-users directly.
>>> 
>>> also good point with regards to using local resources,  similar to modern energy networks where most of the budget is not consumed by its production but its transportation, storage and infrastructure.
>>> 
>>> Is there work on p2p search for solid pods underway? I need to look at HTTP/2 and solid pods more closely I guess. my pod on solid.community is currently not in a good shape and I am not really having the feeling of being in control of my own data. Is it more advisable to run my own solid pod?
>>> 
>>> https://neumann.solid.community/public/  
>> 
>> It depends on how much you want to involve yourself in these early stages.
>> 
>> In 1993 I installed Linux on my father’s 40Mhz Laptop to see how well it fared,
>> but it required quite a lot of knowledge to do that. Now everybody runs Linux
>> on their phone and calls it Android. 
>> 
>> At this point the cloud version would be less work to get going I guess :-)
>> 
>> I think of the web when deployed on individual instances as peer to peer,
>> and with Solid it really is so, since for example you authenticating to a server,
>> requires the Guard to become a client to fetch data from another server.
>> Each node can be in one and the other role at different times - which is not
>> to say that some nodes like browsers won’t specialize.
>> 
>> P2P file sharing with duplication of content across nodes should really be
>> named something else, more like distributed content sharing. Adding such features
>> on Solid pods would be possible, but I think they are trying to restrict to keep focus.
>> Adding it the right way - with RDF data to link to other copies on other pods - would
>> be a nice research project. Perhaps the most important place to add that for
>> Solid servers would be as distributed (encrypted) backups of one's pod on friends pods.
>> 
>> Henry
>> 
>>> 
>>> 
>>> On Sun, Jun 16, 2019 at 5:25 PM Henry Story <henry.story@bblfish.net> wrote:
>>> My guess is that such studies have not been done, mostly because widespread
>>> deployment as would happen if Solid became widespread has not happened
>>> yet.
>>> 
>>> But there are some reasons one could be optimistic.
>>> 
>>> 1. everyone has a DSL box at home currently that is on and not doing much
>>> a lot of the day, so consuming energy for nothing. Instead with Solid Pods
>>> those would be doing something useful, and could use electricity from solar
>>> energy produced locally. So you don’t increase local electricity costs
>>> that much, you can use locally produced electricity, but you increase some
>>> consumption of data.
>>> 
>>> 2. It is likely that most people communicate with local friends, and in
>>> most case don’t cross frontiers due to language barriers. This may not be
>>> the case for the W3C community, but for the wider populations this is a
>>> lot more likely.  So in a way Solid pods communicating with local friends
>>> would use less energy, since packets would not need to be sent around the
>>> world.
>>> 
>>> 3. There are a lot of optimization strategies that can be made by having
>>> widely deployed pods. For example used in p2p networks, by fetching copies
>>> of data heavy media in the nearest cache.
>>> 
>>> 4. With the internet of things growing, having the packets stay as far as
>>> required in the home rather than go to large service providers, should
>>> also improve data costs as well as privacy. That is the role of a local DSL
>>> box turned into a data pod is in any case going to grow in importance, so 
>>> one may as well use this growing infrastructure.
>>> 
>>> Since producing energy locally is more efficient, and communicating locally
>>> when that is needed is better, there are reasons to think that some of 
>>> the advantages of large providers may be offset in other ways. That is
>>> without counting the huge improvements in efficiency in communication
>>> that come with HTTP2, reactive frameworks, and cpu efficiencies.
>>> 
>>> Henry
>>> 
>>> > On 16 Jun 2019, at 12:41, Marco Neumann <marco.neumann@gmail.com> wrote:
>>> > 
>>> > Has anybody done work on Carbon Efficiency of Semantic Web and Linked Data Queries?
>>> > 
>>> > The very nature of distributed data sets has to come with a substantial computational footprint every time a query is issued to a single node or a cluster of nodes for a federated query. On the other hand decentralization might actually outperform more centralized services in the future. 
>>> > 
>>> > I can find a number of papers and articles related to carbon efficiency in general computing and cloud computing environments and data centers but nothing specifically related to the improvement of operational efficiency introduced by Semantic Web and Linked Data infrastructures.
>>> > 
>>> > There is CO2GLE which attempts to estimate the CO2 emissions per second released by web search engines like Google as a reference here:
>>> > 
>>> > https://qz.com/1267709/every-google-search-results-in-co2-emissions-this-real-time-dataviz-shows-how-much/
>>> > 
>>> > 
>>> > Regards,
>>> > Marco
>>> > 
>>> > 
>>> > 
>>> > -- 
>>> > 
>>> > 
>>> > ---
>>> > Marco Neumann
>>> > KONA
>>> > 
>>> 
>> 
>

Received on Tuesday, 18 June 2019 09:05:48 UTC