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Here’s a real-time view of what your Facebook clicks are doing to the environment

Here’s a real-time view of what your Facebook clicks are doing to the environment

Every like and comment and photo shared on Facebook has some ecological cost. The machines that process and store them use power, which still mostly comes from coal; and they need to be cooled.

These vents pull in huge amounts of air to cool the facility. All those bits traveling through wires generate a lot of heat.

Facebook is famously green on the data center side, and today, it’s introducing a new level of transparency. With two new dashboards, you’ll now be able to see the real-time impact and efficiency behind the scenes of all your Facebook activity.

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Every like and comment and photo shared on Facebook has some ecological cost. The machines that process and store them use power, which still mostly comes from coal; and they need to be cooled. Facebook and the Open Compute coalition of hardware manufacturers and tech companies have made great strides in designing the most efficient machines possible for doing this job with as little negative environmental impact as possible.

In fact, Facebook has two data centers dedicated to Open Compute’s green-first designs. One is in the cooler clime of Prineville, Ore.; the other is in Forest City, NC.

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Both data centers now have real-time online dashboards anyone can access (check out the Prineville dashboard and/or the Forest City dashboard for yourself — both are interesting and interactive).

On these dashboards, you can look at a visual representation of important data-center stats — the humidity, the power usage effectiveness (PUE), the water usage efficiency (WUE), and the temperature. You can also track these metrics over time throughout the past 24 hours, the past week, the past quarter, or even the past full year.

“We’re proud of our data center efficiency, and we think it’s important to demystify data centers and share more about what our operations really look like,” writes Facebook efficiency project manager Lyrica McTiernan in an Open Compute blog post today.

“We began sharing PUE for our Prineville data center at the end of Q2 2011 and released our first Prineville WUE in the summer of 2012. Now we’re pulling back the curtain to share some of the same information that our data center technicians view every day.”

For even more visual stimulation, here’s a collection of photos we took during a walking tour of Facebook’s Prineville data center. Especially interesting: How Facebook manages to keep the machines running at top efficiency without traditional air conditioning.

Construction on the Prineville center started in January 2010.
That’s just one building. Facebook is building two more in Prineville and other data centers around the world.
The Prineville gnome garden stands in “gnome-man’s land” and leads to lots of punny “gnomenclature.”
It all started with two engineers sketching on this napkin…
Ken Patchett is the site operations manager for the Prineville facility. He’s been managing data centers since 1998 & has worked at Google and Microsoft facilities in the past.
These vents pull in huge amounts of air to cool the facility. All those bits traveling through wires generate a lot of heat.
Once the air flows into the second floor space above the server room, it gets pulled through this wall of filters.
After being filtered, the air gets pulled through a bath of fine mist for cooler temperatures and higher humidity.
Finally, the cool, damp air is sucked through a wall of stark, white fans and is allowed to fall into the server room, where it helps cool the machines that house your profile.
On the Open Compute machines, you’ll find no screws. They require no tools at all for assembly or repair.
This caged, locked area contains the servers that store and process financial data for Facebook Credits transactions.
Tens of thousands of servers exist in this one building, and many more buildings are going to be built around the world for Facebook’s use.
At the far end of the server room is a giant “Like” button that lights up when you push it — a two-hands kind of task due to its size.
These “crash carts” roll along the aisles of servers. As Patchett put it, you don’t want to have to run a half mile back to a desk when you really need a screwdriver.
That right there? That’s you “liking” your aunt’s new sheep on Farmville.
These are the Open Compute machines – open-source hardware that anyone can see specs for and potentially improve on.
On the left, Open Compute machines do data processing. On the right, ODM boxes store your profile information.
Each generator building houses these diesel-burning engines.
The facility has 14 semi-truck-sized generators in case of electrical grid failure.
The facility is guarded by 27 people – that’s about half its total full-time staff.
Most of the data center’s power comes from the local power utility, but some comes from this solar array set up next to the building.

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