Thought for the day:

We used to measure data centres in how many rack units of capacity they had - e.g. this data centre has 5000 rack unit equivalent capacity. This is a measure of physical capacity.

Then we measure data centres in TFLOPS - how many trillions of floating point operations they could perform. This is a measure of computational capacity.

Now we measure data centres in Gigawatts - how much power they consume. This is a measure of power consumption, not physical space or output.

What *should* we measure data centres in? Gigalitres of water consumed? Households disrupted by their construction?

#data #dataCentres #HPC