this doesn't have anything to do with urbanism but this is where these normally go. haven't even heard it yet, just very excited about the guest (she's the catgirl who found the no fly list recently)
this doesn't have anything to do with urbanism but this is where these normally go. haven't even heard it yet, just very excited about the guest (she's the catgirl who found the no fly list recently)
How?? How is it less efficient for one processor and one disk drive to do an operation than doubling that and doing many multiple times the number of operations to both read/write and transmit? Certainly there are benefits to using someone else's hard drive but efficiency isn't one of them.
The number of people it takes to maintain them is lower. Cooling the servers is probably cheaper. Probably higher utilization. An idle rack server still uses tons of power. I assume cloud clusters can do a better job scaling with demand (you can even buy demand compute power to run when seevers aren't in use). They also have people dedicated to making their servers more energy efficient and lower cost to run. Pre-configured software designed to be efficient on their server hardware. And other various shared cluster infrastructure that has to exist for every server cluster.
I'm also not sure what scenario you're envisioning. Usually you're just moving from storage in one location to storage in another (which might even be able to share a drive with other users). If the compute and storage are in the cloud then there's probably not much extra network usage.