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Want an energy efficient datacenter? Build it underwater

199 points by Qworg 10y ago

deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
_wmd 10y ago
This is a fun concept with potentially even more interesting consequences. Using the ocean as a giant heatsink would result in a water temperature slightly higher than elsewhere, I wonder if over time it would suffice to attract the attention of non-local aquatic life, or affect the migratory habits of the existing species
- Scaevolus 10y ago
  Power plants already vent excess heat into rivers and oceans. Changes in temperature are usually bad for aquatic life, unfortunately. :-( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermal_pollution https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermal_pollution
  - ryao 10y ago
    The same effect occurs when getting into a hot car. You gasp for air.
- thephyber 10y ago
  Nuclear power plant water exchangers in both California and Sweden have attracted blooms of jellyfish[1], who then clogged the heat exchangers and caused the power plants to cut power output to mitigate the efficiency loss. [1] http://www.popsci.com/article/technology/jellyfish-shut-down-massive-nuclear-power-plant http://www.popsci.com/article/technology/jellyfish-shut-down...
  - baking 10y ago
    Looking at this more closely, it would seem that the primary test they were doing with this was the effectiveness of the external heat exchangers. They had one rack consuming 27kW maximum, but they had 5 large external heat exchangers (of two different designs) and all kinds of external tubing and valves to manage the cooling fluid flow. Seems like overkill unless they were running tests on the effect of different operating temperatures on biofouling and vice versa.
sandworm101 10y ago
Energy efficient maybe, but not cost efficient. Computers+salt water = bad things. Ask anyone trying to maintain anything within sight of an ocean. Salt gets into everything eventually. Build on the land. Put a heat exchanger in the ocean. Pump nice friendly coolant to and fro. Forget the idea of setting up shop literally underwater.
- jedberg 10y ago
  The pod is sealed, it doesn't even have oxygen inside.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
  - sandworm101 10y ago
    And how does data get into this data center? Where is the power comming from? All those connections still must go through penetrations. It can be done, i just question the worth.
    - ryao 10y ago
      Penetrations are not necessary. It is possible to use electromagnetic radiation to transfer both data and power.
      - xjwm 10y ago
        EM isn't going to travel very well or very far through water. You would want something exposed on the surface, and preferably in very close proximity. Every time you transform power, you're going to incur losses.
    - tbabb 10y ago
      Power from a seabed cable or nearby offshore power. Data by the same cable. Sealing a cable or a small container is not hard to do at all.
- 10y ago
jedberg 10y ago
This is great. A long time ago I had this crazy idea that if we built data centers at the poles, we could solve a lot of problems. Each one would sit idle 1/2 the year, but you could power it with solar and cool it with the outside air. Of course the big problem was latency. It was one I couldn't conceive of a good solution for. This is much better. It takes advantage of the same idea but you can park it right next to a population center and move it around the world fairly quickly as demand requires. I love this idea!
- beaconstudios 10y ago
  a datacenter at the poles might also contribute to melting the ice.
  - Cleisthenes 10y ago
    More or less than burning fossil fuels to keep the data center cool at non-polar latitudes?
    - NegativeLatency 10y ago
      Less than or equal to the same amount of energy would be dissipated, but it would be closer to the actual ice.
      - mehwoot 10y ago
        But global warming isnt caused by energy dissipation, its caused by the greenhouse effect.
        titanomachy 10y ago
        I'm not sure why you're getting downvoted. Humans producing heat is not the problem; humans producing pollution is.
    - beaconstudios 10y ago
kortex 10y ago
I wonder what the cost differential is (any given rack, not just an underwater one) for a system which is designed to NEVER be maintained by people over its service life (or duty). Hard drive goes bad? Board fails? Just push the load elsewhere and shut off power to it. No idea what sort of attrition rate these systems have. Sure, you might be at 50% capacity after 3 years, but that's just like lithium ion batteries.
- chatmasta 10y ago
  Interesting question. Perhaps you should look at the cost of spacecraft engineering for an example. You can't replace the hard drive on a probe billions of miles from earth!
  - SomeStupidPoint 10y ago
    I think what GP is proposing is significantly different than space craft: in space, you have limited space for redundancy, so you overbuild to avoid failure of key parts. I think GP is proposing you start with, say, 11000 servers when you have a planned capacity of 10000, and just cycle off bad ones for spares (or just diminished capacity) until you redo the whole system. I believe that's how Microsoft operates their server farms, but I could be mistaken.
    - kortex 10y ago
      Space is craaazy expensive for a lot more reasons though (ionization and lack of mission-redundancy are the big ones. Every launch is expensive, so every mission/satellite must have a bazillion nines).
- noir_lord 10y ago
  Some of the big cloud providers (Google and I think Facebook) do exactly this in their DC's, when hardware dies they just leave it dead until enough has failed in that rack to make it worth swapping out the whole thing. When you have a 100,000 of anything electrical MTBF will hit you every day.
MrCoolSwing 10y ago
server outage due to whales anyone?
adamwi 10y ago
Always fun with people that run with exotic ideas =) I might be missing some aspects but would it not be much easier to locate the datacenter on land but close to the ocean (or other large body of water), with similar principles as used for cooling nuclear reactors? Then you would get the benefits but would not have the same strict requirements on reliability of the components. If you locate it on land you would also have the benefit of using the excess heat for house heating (if located in cold climate and the temperature difference to outside is big enough). This is done in a number of cases in Sweden with excess heat from large industrial plants [1]. [1] Report in Swedish; http://www.svenskfjarrvarme.se/Global/Rapporter%20och%20dokument%20INTE%20Fj%C3%A4rrsyn/Ovriga_rapporter/Energitillforsel_och_Produktion/Spillvarme-fran_industrin_till_fjarrvarme_2004_5.pdf http://www.svenskfjarrvarme.se/Global/Rapporter%20och%20doku...
- nxc18 10y ago
  I would be concerned with the cost of real estate at that point. They didn't talk about it, but I expect they're not paying rent/buying land off shore. Seaside real estate is expensive afaik.
  - cr1895 10y ago
    >They didn't talk about it, but I expect they're not paying rent/buying land off shore. Seaside real estate is expensive afaik. I don't know how it'd work for something like a submerged data center, but blocks of area are indeed sold off by the government bodies that administrate them to O&G producers. This is also not cheap.
deftnerd 10y ago
The article mentions that one of the benefits is that they don't have to deal with building codes being different in different places. It's truly an "off the shelf" data center that doesn't have to be customized for the laws, zoning, and codes in that area. But who is in charge of the seabed around the United States? I imagine that I can't just drop a big metal container on the ocean floor without informing someone or asking permission, otherwise there would be a lot of things just dumped out there. I also wonder about jurisdiction. If the data center is outside of the Territorial Zone (12 nautical miles from shore) but is inside of the 200nm exclusive economic zone (EEZ), which country would jurisdiction fall under? The country that owns the EEZ? Would the data center fly a flag of its owning country? Perhaps the country where the cabling comes ashore? Some interesting legal questions. Perhaps the datacenter would be treated like a submarine in terms of jurisdiction. It could allow Microsoft to have their Irish branch open data centers 13 nautical miles offshore of the West Coast to provide storage that's harder for the US to legally get into.
- tn13 10y ago
  But what about global warming ? Wouldn't rising water levels be a big threat to such experiments ?
  - DuskStar 10y ago
    Let's say climate change gets absolutely horrific, and we see a 1m rise in sea levels over the course of a pod's 10 year lifespan. So your underwater datacenter pod, originally deployed 200m below the surface, is now at 201m. Somehow I don't think this would be an enormous problem.
    - longerthoughts 10y ago
      A similar argument could be made for concerns over rising water temperatures as a result of climate change - what might be considered a dramatic rise to climate scientists and marine biologists would likely have little impact on a datacenter.
jefflombardjr 10y ago
I'm all for exploring new approaches, however: a) Salt water is highly corrosive. Wouldn't maintenance costs be high? b) Isn't marine biology highly sensitive to heat pollution? For high latency services like Amazon Glacier, wouldn't it make sense to host in a place like Iceland? Really cheap hydrothermic/clean power. Highly educated local talent pool, and relatively consistent cool temperatures. If you're maintaining 80F (http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2008/10/14/google-raise-your-data-center-temperature/ http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2008/10/14/googl...) the ambient temps outside should provide ample cooling year round. For lower latency requirements, wouldn't it be worth it to install efficient cooling powered by electricity? (preferably renewable) With cheap solar who really cares about grid power loss and associated inefficiencies? Essentially, I think it makes sense to get better at solar than to have Steve Zissou as a server admin.
- Florin_Andrei 10y ago
  > Salt water is highly corrosive. To metals. Not so much to plastics. > Isn't marine biology highly sensitive to heat pollution? Isn't land-based biology highly sensitive to heat pollution?
  - smallnamespace 10y ago
    > Isn't land-based biology highly sensitive to heat pollution? No, land-based organisms comparatively have a much, much higher tolerance to temperature swings. Water's high heat capacity and conductivity means that most marine environments have extremely stable temperature ranges (a few degrees one way or other), so most marine species are adapted to live in only that range, and quickly die otherwise. Tropical fish are hard to keep alive precisely for this reason. Air temperature varies much more widely depending on time of day, season, and weather, so terrestrial organisms have all developed extensive strategies for thermoregulation (e.g. mammals, birds). For example, dogs can survive in both arctic and tropical environments. Plus, while heat is naturally dissipated upward, underwater thermal plumes are more likely to affect fish than above-ground plumes would affect birds. FYI, Cornell uses lake water to cool several campus buildings, and they needed to carefully review that the warmer return water wouldn't negatively affect fish [1]. [1] https://energyandsustainability.fs.cornell.edu/util/cooling/production/lsc/eis/fish.cfm https://energyandsustainability.fs.cornell.edu/util/cooling/...
frandroid 10y ago
So hum, how do you prevent your data center from being stolen.
- Florin_Andrei 10y ago
  Same as on land?
  - sithadmin 10y ago
    Securing a datacenter from intruders on land doesn't require military-grade underwater sensor equipment and response techniques. Securing a datacenter from intruders underwater would.
    - smallnamespace 10y ago
      To be fair, it's also a lot harder to penetrate an underwater datacenter so the risk of attack is likely much lower.
  - closeparen 10y ago
    I don't think the $12.50/hour staff of Allied Barton, Securitas, etc. are SCUBA-certified.
- pvaldes 10y ago
  Aquaculture companies working with sea cages need to hire qualified staff for exactly the same problem. Is not a minor issue.
alkonaut 10y ago
I can see the problem of delivering effective data centers to warm climates, but apart from the latency aspect, my guess is that Facebook's strategy of building a traditional mega-data center close to cheap hydro power in a region with year round cool air is more economic than this. I hope to see them succeed though, especially if the data centers can be self sustained with wind or ocean (wave, tidal, ...) power.
stephengillie 10y ago
Edit: Great points! Space would be a terrible location for data center hosting, not only due to latency and heat radiation issues, but also due to the difficulty in mitigating solar radiation. What about putting the data center in some kind of low Earth orbit? Something within the magnetic field, but far enough out to radiate heat? Would the latency still be a factor if your web server and CDN were hosted "in a cloud" on numerous communications satellites?
- chc 10y ago
  I'm pretty sure dissipating heat is harder in space since you don't have a relatively cool medium like air or water to dump the heat into.
- tbabb 10y ago
  That sounds like just about the worst place to put a datacenter. Getting just a single kilogram to orbit costs about $2000 at its absolute cheapest, so I can think of no better way to send deployment costs through the roof. On top of that, space is bad for heat exchange because there's no convective cooling. Also cosmic rays will wreck havoc on all your delicate silicon chips.
- tshannon 10y ago
  Someone correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe that radiating heat is actually really hard in space. It seems counter intuitive, because space is so cold, but it's mostly a vacuum. To transfer heat, you need a medium for the heat to transfer through. I believe some heat can be lost due to radiation, and so they have these big metal fins as heat sinks to radiate as much heat as possible, and reflective material on the solar facing side to prevent more heat from being absorbed. The water, on the other hand, is a fantastic absorber of heat, and I'm guessing it's easier to drop one in the ocean, rather than launch one to space.
  - noir_lord 10y ago
    > I believe some heat can be lost due to radiation. In hard space all the heat is lost as radiation (minus and incredibly tiny loss from hitting the very few particles in space), the dark side can be treat as a blackbody for a rough approximation. One of the reasons that the side exposed to the sun is mirrored is to reflect as much of the radiation falling on that side as possible as the heat is so hard to get rid off, people think the shiny part is gold but it's actually usually mylar or something stacked in a layered insulation. Space is a horrible environment to make things work, metals spontaneous weld themselves (vacuum welding), radical differentials in temperature depending on orientation, your electronics are constantly hammered by high energy radiation, micro impacts by things travelling at velocities that make a sniper rifle look like a slingshot, it's fascinating as a layman what it takes to keep stuff working reliably up there at all.
walrus01 10y ago
This is cool and all, but salt water is basically cancer. If you want to experience first hand entropy at a rapidly accelerated rate, buy a boat and moor it in salt water. With all of the associated repair/maintenance costs and headaches that go with it. Now add electronics and server equipment. There are ways to use cold water for cooling without submersing things. Many of the buildings in downtown Toronto (including the 151 Front IX point and datacenter) are cooled from deep lake loop cooling/heat exchange: https://www.google.com/search?q=toronto+deep+lake+cooling&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&client=firefox-b https://www.google.com/search?q=toronto+deep+lake+cooling&ie...
jpm_sd 10y ago
This is ridiculous. Data centers contain thousands of racks like the single rack shown in the demo "pod" and they all require hands-on human maintenance from time to time. This becomes quite a bit harder when your server rack is in a sealed steel tube on the seafloor. Splitting the data center into thousands of "pods" will also greatly increase the cost of cabling and connectors for power and data distribution (we're talking $100 per connector here) and the number of cable failures will skyrocket. Did you know that fish like to chew on submarine cables? Unless you get steel-armored cables, which are defended against "fishbite"...
- baking 10y ago
  If one server goes down and they are not able to restore it remotely they will just write it off. If a large number go down due to some common failure, it might make sense to haul the whole thing up and refurbish it.
  - cr0sh 10y ago
    I've heard that this is what many data centers currently do anyhow. That when a client "moves on" (moves out, dissolves, etc) - the machines are just left behind, because it costs more to unrack/transport/etc than it does to leave them in place. /source: worked for a small cloud computing VPS provider
- randyrand 10y ago
  Agreed. It makes way more sense to just build it next to an ocean and pump the water.
- amygdyl 10y ago
  Recent AWS presentation showed off very less dense server configurations than any commercial vendor typically offers. I guessed, i forget now if there was specific mention, that airflow simply costs a lot more than I first realized, after all i am only dumping host fan exhausts into someone else's co'lo design, which then has to deal with that. I bet it's substantially different, owning the whole building. So, what if just submerging containers or pods of servers in cold sea water, combined with unforced airflow designs, was a passive cooling possibility? After all, in theory, there's no surrounding facility to cool, and space is unlikely to be a major direct cost factor. Despite I wonder, given land reliably increases in value, whether, once land acquisition is factored out, the kind of permits and early studies might bring costs back again.(excluding design NRE) Marine insurance struck me as a important unknown. I grew up by the Channel coast in England, and i can't imagine anyone allowing heavy containers to be anchored or moored where they might break free into shipping lanes, without quite detailed study and assurances.
dougmany 10y ago
I see the makings of a great story. In 300 years, treasure hunters search for a lost data-center that drifted away in a storm.
- jlgaddis 10y ago
  ... and sell the treasure (data) they find to advertisers?
  - amygdyl 10y ago
    i am quite sure if most visitors here sat in front a randomly selected home computer, the relevancy of a message in the bottle, here, would be how fast pages render thanks to advertising networks. I took a 18 month mid-late sabbatical rolling up time owed, until last March, almost free of computing entirely, and I still cannot undo the effect i experienced, i drifted into rage ranting to an attorney friend how I had a claim for Theft Of Electricity (I think section 3 of Theft Act 80 in the E&W bit of UK) , i was so incapable of absorbing the enormity of influence. (Disclaimer I work in advertising, but printed kind, on principle. I am naturally absolutely pro advertising, but Prof Mark Ritson is worth your time infinitely more than mine, to hear views not greatly distant, how advertising agencies have ruined their own business, making online ads a deeply revolting sick joke, on them as much as readers. Readers not "users" or even "visitors". Audience if it's audio or video, certainly, and for "reach" discussion of publications identifiable by social influence creating thereby a eagerly receptive audience willing to passively consume. But Readers we are. Prof. Ritson's talks on the tube are superb, and are better at teaching what I wish every customer, let alone every small customer* or startup. I beg anyone selling anything anywhere study what that man says about the industry you may rely on for customers and livelihood. I still have Sting singing "Clickbait in a bottle" in my head... * (my foible to say customer not client, because soliciting clients is unlawful in public, sorry bad law joke intimating prostitution by who seek @clients@ when most "clients" really want to buy concretely deliverable things)
  - amygdyl 10y ago
    sad to report the treasure analogy fails, if you price bulk data feeds from brokers. My suspicion is that it's simply not likely to be anyone's choice, as a talented programmer, or data scientist, or even academic in related , to work for a advertising agency, even if salaries were comparable. The difficulty of comparing salaries that's not obvious to the casual observer might inform about cultural values: agencies indeed reward strongly correlated to results. But the tendency is to create expense account lifestyles that are lavish golden handcuffs. I have known fiends reach the age they feel a family is overdue, but be unable to almost even speak at the reality their lifestyle as a single young employee would require a zero before tax, appended to their base remuneration. I don't even think that shock is so rare, but rarer since 08 certainly, as whole societies are feeling financial pressure. Adland is a perilous bubble for those possessing the greatest talents to inflate the bubble. often would fantasize at I opening a meeting with a sharp announcement, "This is a code review. You don't write software. But every line you communicate, causes a trace effect in the reality of sales for our customers (clients, but i loathe the word) We shall now begin by taking one another's client proposals and creative briefs, anonymously, and, after explaining in summary the method and action of the instruction that was acted upon by this agency, analyze the accuracy and efficiency and reliability of each part of those tasks, against this cube containing enough data to clarify sales that each action can possibly affect. ___ Oh, yes, this does happen time to time, by some value of approximately, but would you habitually demand a team confine themselves to measurable actions whose methods can be verified, classified, and show to interact properly with other job roles, few agency company cultures would not be quickly suffering. I believe as I did not long after first hired, when whiskey under the desk was far from unacceptable, barely frowned upon, that mental and emotional well being is inversely disproportional to dominant environment structure and cohesion. i.e. random makes unhappy minds. No disrespect intended towards some very goo data driven agencies i've known, but data is treated as almost anathema to advertising agencies and especially creatives. Prof Ritson laments the effect of this has been to fragment creative talent so far from the vital intrinsic of the profession, that data is maligned (and arguably more so due to systematic fraud become a openly accepted rate of $8BLN p.a.) that the cumulative effect is utter dysfunction. My own experience of trying to command data with utility in agency settings, is of oil and water that mix only when copious branded detergent ads are applied. (Because detergents are typically marketed by "under the line" advertising, coupons, direct mail (as Prof Ritson argues the web became in L.C.D. finality) where numbers are considered appropriately valuable. That was long wind talk to support a flippant view that if ad agencies knew how to use the data they are collecting, it would cost maybe more than cents in the dollar, to reliably pull complete personal records to "enrich" a website's logs. I'm talking your cell no., income, every personal aspect, recent purchases this week, diet, health data too often sold. Because it has only limited marginal value to each user, meaning advertiser or seller, for websites being direct mail then because direct mail responses hold at a single digit percentage for all i unknowingly may surmise may be a fundamental law of nature, the value of any record is held very low indeed. Yet at each passing through the system, data attaches to the record, and the probability of incredibly invasive data being available on anyone lapse even momentarily regarding their cookie oversight drifts upwards to one. Which makes astonishing detail of data perpetually anyone's for peanuts. I omitted my flippant belief that agencies are unable to learn how to use data, causing the overflow ad oversupply and undervaluation of dangerous intimate data, but the above marginal value and incremental tendency of records which rarely are pruned, accurately explains the sad real mechanism selling our privacy for oh, maybe 20 cents for a map of your life this past week... Can we not bury the ad network servers at sea? I guess that only means more latency.. If you're a startup and can find a good small agent to buy print adverts, look to the myriad association vanity magazines, that parallel vertical trade magazines. Prime positions can be had for peanuts. Amid hardly any competing advertisers. Three, last time I got a copy of The Royal Institute Of Engineers in house glossy magazine, Ingenia. (excellent read, too. Just three advertising pages. The fourth might be your company, negotiated fora couple thousand. Gales used to do the International Professional Associations Directory, which we used starting out too long ago, to broker at first by hand, pencil, HP17 and phone. Phones. Trader turrets... I think we need a law to actually throw the unthinkable mass of data out there in private company hands, too easily bought, too cheaply bought, by anyone, into the sea already. A restart with only brief amnesty.; If you did succeed in not being tracked and profiled, you'll be recorded as a infill extrapolation or pure guesswork, and i think made up data, by the wrong parties, is even more dangerous. Those incremented "enriched lists" are too easily salted. (Disclaimer: my company now works on developing we hope will allow monitoring of such data records without leaking identities of subject customers. But we'd rather not think the job is worth doing. If anyone intrepid or reckless or otherwise misguided ever desires advice how to best book pint ads for the customer, for your own use, i'd be delighted to respond best i can, email in profile)
baking 10y ago
The article doesn't mention crush pressure at depths of 200M so I'm thinking the plan is to replace the air with mineral oil which is non-conductive and absorbs heat well. But it will also mean the containers will probably not be bouyant.
Shubley 10y ago
Wouldn't it be a lot more feasible to just make the datacenter on the shore and make a liquid coolant loop that cools in the water? Like the Toronto office towers.
- frozenport 10y ago
  I had the same thought. Maybe temperature?
andrewguenther 10y ago
I'm surprised that they're so dismissive of heat pollution. Google's Finland data center, which is cooled by ocean water, has a holding tank used to cool the ocean water before pumping it back into the ocean[1] in order to prevent a similar problem. I would like to see additional research here rather than baselessly dismissing it. [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VChOEvKicQQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VChOEvKicQQ
Nostromov 10y ago
Lots of comments already, but 100% this is complete bullshit. If they manage to make it a diverse project (branching into other possible fields) and even if not, this is part of a cat-and-mouse game of placing live electronics for purposes of underwater warfare, espionage and such. For example smart mines that will be powered, but indistinguishable from the signature of these "server farms", then hydrophones and other such technology for locating and tracking submarines and so on. "About the Authors" makes clear how no thoughts other than the clown game were entertained by the article, but aren't we past the times that things get written about 20-30-50 years down the line. :)
wtbob 10y ago
> The reason underwater data centers could be built more quickly than land-based ones is easy enough to understand. Today, the construction of each such installation is unique. The equipment might be the same, but building codes, taxes, climate, workforce, electricity supply, and network connectivity are different everywhere. And those variables affect how long construction takes. We also observe their effects in the performance of our facilities, where otherwise identical equipment exhibits different levels of reliability depending on where it is located. In the context of the discussion about cost disease, this is quite remarkable for demonstrating how regulation and local differences have raised costs to the point that a large company is seriously considering building data centres beneath the waves.
ben_says 10y ago
I'm all for this... I think it might be one of the few ways to protect against the sun's future EMP.
biggio 10y ago
Yeah screw the environment
tomohawk 10y ago
I wonder if they would power these with DC instead of AC, given the issues of transmitting AC through underwater cables. http://www02.abb.com/global/seitp/seitp161.nsf/0/0eed46e53027b407c125708b0059213e/$file/Electrical+supply+for+offshore+by+use+of+VSC.pdf http://www02.abb.com/global/seitp/seitp161.nsf/0/0eed46e5302...
aaron695 10y ago
"I think there is a world market for maybe five computers." Amazon, Microsoft, Google. Off by two.
kristianp 10y ago
How long before our computation needs require LEO datacenters with huge solar arrays that always face the sun? Consecutive requests might be sent to different satellites as they move past. More difficult to dump heat in space.
elihu 10y ago
Seems like it would be simpler and easier to just build a datacenter near the ocean and pump seawater to it. Regardless of how it works, I wonder if it's possible to get significantly more performance out of chips that are explicitly designed to operate at a much lower maximum temperature? Let's say you want to build a datacenter somewhere like the Northern coast of Alaska or Antarctica, and you have year-round reliable and abundant access to sea water that's barely above freezing, and suppose that you're willing to order enough CPUs / GPUs / bitcoin mining ASICs or whatever to justify your supplier to design and manufacture custom chips to operate in a lower temperature range. Is there some potential boon to performance or reduced manufacturing cost (due to looser tolerances) that might make such an effort worthwhile?
- akira2501 10y ago
  > Is there some potential boon to performance or reduced manufacturing cost Guessing, but in the balance, I would assume no. Power generation costs are higher and service is less reliable. Staffing is more costly. Transport for all other resources is also more costly and at a much higher delay than in many other areas that are traditionally used. From my own experience with high power (~25kW) FM radio transmitters, some of which we have at the top of mountains in the middle of ski-resorts: while cooling costs are reduced throughout the winter, they /aren't/ totally eliminated, so you still need to size and maintain the equipment for summer loads anyways. Getting to the site to do work and maintenance is an absolute chore; replacing the transmitter was a 10 man job where similar rigs in other locations only required 3. Although, if it was the summer, after we finished our work, we got to take the alpine slide down the hill. As to why we put it there in the first place, signal coverage was excellent, and they already had the power we required available due to the chair-lifts being nearby. If we could have put it somewhere else and got the same coverage, we would have.
sathackr 10y ago
I really can't see the benefit of submerging these -- the complexity involved with keeping out several hundred PSI of sea water just doesn't seem to make sense to me. For the cooling aspect, they're already using pumped water and heat exchangers. What is the benefit of submersion vs just pumping sea water from a pipe to a land, or barge-based datacenter and using that to cool?
- rosalinekarr 10y ago
  Why does it have to be several hundred PSI? They don't have to put it at the bottom of the ocean. A shallow lake or river would work just as well.
  - sathackr 10y ago
    The article mentioned that they would be between 50 and 200 meters below the surface. I assume to access the cooler waters at those depths. 50msw = 74psi 200msw = 293psi
- titanomachy 10y ago
  I don't think it would be that complex, since the pods can be permanently sealed and don't need to exchange matter with the environment. I would assume that a lot of the complexity in waterproofing marine vessels comes from the need for openable doors.
  - sathackr 10y ago
    No doubt doors are one of the biggest challenges. Many of the challenges could be reduced or mitigated if the pods could be at least partially pressurized to reduce the pressure differential between the inside and out -- but that introduces another complexity -- can the server hardware handle it. There are quite a few engineering challenges, none of them unsolvable but also none of them seem necessary when it seems the same benefits can be obtained for less effort by keeping the pods above water.
    - 10y ago
ChuckMcM 10y ago
Imagine if you built a data center was on a river that was fed by mountain snow melt, and you created a diversion that took some of that water, ran it along heat exchangers in your racks and the out through a hydro-power unit and back into the river on the other side. You might be able to build the first negative PUE data center in the world. But you wouldn't tell anyone about it lest you lose your competitive advantage!
- learc83 10y ago
  The Google datacenter a few miles from my house my house is right next to the Chattahoochee river. They take water from the treatment plant that was going to be pumped into the river to use in their heat exchangers. Then they clean it and pump it into the river.
ecthiender 10y ago
Isn't it obvious and common sensical that it is a red flag to operate a data center underwater? I mean there might be short term benefits, but in the long term you'll be polluting and damaging the underwater ecosystem.
rascul 10y ago
Doesn't work. DigitalOcean has been working on this for some time and their Atlantis datacenter still isn't open. https://www.digitalocean.com/company/blog/announcing-atlantis/ https://www.digitalocean.com/company/blog/announcing-atlanti...
- sgk284 10y ago
  For those who might miss the date on that blog post, it's an April Fool's joke.
  - dumbsecreport 10y ago
    thank you for providing a safe haven free of aprils fools trickery for all of us sensitive people
  - Groxx 10y ago
    You say that, but it sounds like a win/win from where I'm sitting: >Our investigation was a great success: not only were we able to reduce our electricity costs by 35%, but we discovered our high-density SSD storage was even more dense at 87atm! Time to replicate / H2O-as-a-service it.
- cpursley 10y ago
  Dude, note the date. That is an April Fools joke.
tlow 10y ago
What about environmental impact?
jonbarker 10y ago
DigitalOcean should have named it "sealab".
bhauer 10y ago
Sadly, the Natick web page [1] hasn't been updated in quite some time and now has a TLS/SSL problem. [1] https://natick.research.microsoft.com/ https://natick.research.microsoft.com/
jchen11 10y ago
I would be interested knowing 1) % of total operating cost saved from cooling savings 2) % of building costs saved from standardized building and simplified regulations. Also, it wounld be awesome if we could moor these to offshore wind turbines.
drdeadringer 10y ago
Expiration of 1970s SciFi technology. I'm for it if only to rule it out. I see no problem in this R&D.
jsilence 10y ago
Why dissipate the residual heat into the environment when you could use it for residential heating and/or heating of green houses. This concept seems to be a design for waste of resources to me.
- mnw21cam 10y ago
  Thermodynamics. The exhaust temperature of the data centre has to be significantly higher than the temperature of the thing you want to heat, especially if that heat is to be transported any appreciable distance. Otherwise, the heat will not flow in the right direction. With data centres these days trying to keep chip temperatures as low as possible, this really makes the temperature gradient very low. An alternative would be to pump in a little bit more energy and use the exhaust heat as a source for a heat pump.
  - jsilence 10y ago
    With the temperature level of a datacenter you can easily operate a heat pump with a COP of 5 to 6. Or mix in the CHP to raise temperature level to motor exhaust levels. Use the electricity for the datacenter. Lot of potential.
- YokoZar 10y ago
  The article mentions that data centers don't tend to be allowed near where people live for a variety of reasons.
- andai 10y ago
  I see a future where residential heating is powered by community owned bitcoin mining rigs.
FreekNortier 10y ago
We have found a new way to make the oceans even warmer.
z3t4 10y ago
I think it would be easier to just use solar and wind plus huge batteries.
archiides 10y ago
Would it be feasible to use the heat generated to power a stirling engine?
n2dasun 10y ago
Perhaps you could use a non-reactive medium like Green Revolution and use the seawater as a heat sink for it? http://www.grcooling.com/ http://www.grcooling.com/

199 points by Qworg 10y ago

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

_wmd 10y ago

This is a fun concept with potentially even more interesting consequences. Using the ocean as a giant heatsink would result in a water temperature slightly higher than elsewhere, I wonder if over time it would suffice to attract the attention of non-local aquatic life, or affect the migratory habits of the existing species

Scaevolus 10y ago
Power plants already vent excess heat into rivers and oceans. Changes in temperature are usually bad for aquatic life, unfortunately. :-( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermal_pollution https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermal_pollution
- ryao 10y ago
  The same effect occurs when getting into a hot car. You gasp for air.
thephyber 10y ago
Nuclear power plant water exchangers in both California and Sweden have attracted blooms of jellyfish[1], who then clogged the heat exchangers and caused the power plants to cut power output to mitigate the efficiency loss. [1] http://www.popsci.com/article/technology/jellyfish-shut-down-massive-nuclear-power-plant http://www.popsci.com/article/technology/jellyfish-shut-down...
- baking 10y ago
  Looking at this more closely, it would seem that the primary test they were doing with this was the effectiveness of the external heat exchangers. They had one rack consuming 27kW maximum, but they had 5 large external heat exchangers (of two different designs) and all kinds of external tubing and valves to manage the cooling fluid flow. Seems like overkill unless they were running tests on the effect of different operating temperatures on biofouling and vice versa.

sandworm101 10y ago

Energy efficient maybe, but not cost efficient. Computers+salt water = bad things. Ask anyone trying to maintain anything within sight of an ocean. Salt gets into everything eventually. Build on the land. Put a heat exchanger in the ocean. Pump nice friendly coolant to and fro. Forget the idea of setting up shop literally underwater.

jedberg 10y ago
The pod is sealed, it doesn't even have oxygen inside.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- sandworm101 10y ago
  And how does data get into this data center? Where is the power comming from? All those connections still must go through penetrations. It can be done, i just question the worth.
  - ryao 10y ago
    Penetrations are not necessary. It is possible to use electromagnetic radiation to transfer both data and power.
    - xjwm 10y ago
      EM isn't going to travel very well or very far through water. You would want something exposed on the surface, and preferably in very close proximity. Every time you transform power, you're going to incur losses.
  - tbabb 10y ago
    Power from a seabed cable or nearby offshore power. Data by the same cable. Sealing a cable or a small container is not hard to do at all.
10y ago

jedberg 10y ago

This is great. A long time ago I had this crazy idea that if we built data centers at the poles, we could solve a lot of problems. Each one would sit idle 1/2 the year, but you could power it with solar and cool it with the outside air. Of course the big problem was latency. It was one I couldn't conceive of a good solution for. This is much better. It takes advantage of the same idea but you can park it right next to a population center and move it around the world fairly quickly as demand requires. I love this idea!

beaconstudios 10y ago
a datacenter at the poles might also contribute to melting the ice.
- Cleisthenes 10y ago
  More or less than burning fossil fuels to keep the data center cool at non-polar latitudes?
  - NegativeLatency 10y ago
    Less than or equal to the same amount of energy would be dissipated, but it would be closer to the actual ice.
    - mehwoot 10y ago
      But global warming isnt caused by energy dissipation, its caused by the greenhouse effect.
      - titanomachy 10y ago
        I'm not sure why you're getting downvoted. Humans producing heat is not the problem; humans producing pollution is.
  - beaconstudios 10y ago

kortex 10y ago

I wonder what the cost differential is (any given rack, not just an underwater one) for a system which is designed to NEVER be maintained by people over its service life (or duty). Hard drive goes bad? Board fails? Just push the load elsewhere and shut off power to it. No idea what sort of attrition rate these systems have. Sure, you might be at 50% capacity after 3 years, but that's just like lithium ion batteries.

chatmasta 10y ago
Interesting question. Perhaps you should look at the cost of spacecraft engineering for an example. You can't replace the hard drive on a probe billions of miles from earth!
- SomeStupidPoint 10y ago
  I think what GP is proposing is significantly different than space craft: in space, you have limited space for redundancy, so you overbuild to avoid failure of key parts. I think GP is proposing you start with, say, 11000 servers when you have a planned capacity of 10000, and just cycle off bad ones for spares (or just diminished capacity) until you redo the whole system. I believe that's how Microsoft operates their server farms, but I could be mistaken.
  - kortex 10y ago
    Space is craaazy expensive for a lot more reasons though (ionization and lack of mission-redundancy are the big ones. Every launch is expensive, so every mission/satellite must have a bazillion nines).
noir_lord 10y ago
Some of the big cloud providers (Google and I think Facebook) do exactly this in their DC's, when hardware dies they just leave it dead until enough has failed in that rack to make it worth swapping out the whole thing. When you have a 100,000 of anything electrical MTBF will hit you every day.

MrCoolSwing 10y ago

server outage due to whales anyone?

adamwi 10y ago

Always fun with people that run with exotic ideas =) I might be missing some aspects but would it not be much easier to locate the datacenter on land but close to the ocean (or other large body of water), with similar principles as used for cooling nuclear reactors? Then you would get the benefits but would not have the same strict requirements on reliability of the components. If you locate it on land you would also have the benefit of using the excess heat for house heating (if located in cold climate and the temperature difference to outside is big enough). This is done in a number of cases in Sweden with excess heat from large industrial plants [1]. [1] Report in Swedish; http://www.svenskfjarrvarme.se/Global/Rapporter%20och%20dokument%20INTE%20Fj%C3%A4rrsyn/Ovriga_rapporter/Energitillforsel_och_Produktion/Spillvarme-fran_industrin_till_fjarrvarme_2004_5.pdf http://www.svenskfjarrvarme.se/Global/Rapporter%20och%20doku...

nxc18 10y ago
I would be concerned with the cost of real estate at that point. They didn't talk about it, but I expect they're not paying rent/buying land off shore. Seaside real estate is expensive afaik.
- cr1895 10y ago
  >They didn't talk about it, but I expect they're not paying rent/buying land off shore. Seaside real estate is expensive afaik. I don't know how it'd work for something like a submerged data center, but blocks of area are indeed sold off by the government bodies that administrate them to O&G producers. This is also not cheap.

deftnerd 10y ago

The article mentions that one of the benefits is that they don't have to deal with building codes being different in different places. It's truly an "off the shelf" data center that doesn't have to be customized for the laws, zoning, and codes in that area. But who is in charge of the seabed around the United States? I imagine that I can't just drop a big metal container on the ocean floor without informing someone or asking permission, otherwise there would be a lot of things just dumped out there. I also wonder about jurisdiction. If the data center is outside of the Territorial Zone (12 nautical miles from shore) but is inside of the 200nm exclusive economic zone (EEZ), which country would jurisdiction fall under? The country that owns the EEZ? Would the data center fly a flag of its owning country? Perhaps the country where the cabling comes ashore? Some interesting legal questions. Perhaps the datacenter would be treated like a submarine in terms of jurisdiction. It could allow Microsoft to have their Irish branch open data centers 13 nautical miles offshore of the West Coast to provide storage that's harder for the US to legally get into.

tn13 10y ago
But what about global warming ? Wouldn't rising water levels be a big threat to such experiments ?
- DuskStar 10y ago
  Let's say climate change gets absolutely horrific, and we see a 1m rise in sea levels over the course of a pod's 10 year lifespan. So your underwater datacenter pod, originally deployed 200m below the surface, is now at 201m. Somehow I don't think this would be an enormous problem.
  - longerthoughts 10y ago
    A similar argument could be made for concerns over rising water temperatures as a result of climate change - what might be considered a dramatic rise to climate scientists and marine biologists would likely have little impact on a datacenter.

jefflombardjr 10y ago

I'm all for exploring new approaches, however: a) Salt water is highly corrosive. Wouldn't maintenance costs be high? b) Isn't marine biology highly sensitive to heat pollution? For high latency services like Amazon Glacier, wouldn't it make sense to host in a place like Iceland? Really cheap hydrothermic/clean power. Highly educated local talent pool, and relatively consistent cool temperatures. If you're maintaining 80F (http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2008/10/14/google-raise-your-data-center-temperature/ http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2008/10/14/googl...) the ambient temps outside should provide ample cooling year round. For lower latency requirements, wouldn't it be worth it to install efficient cooling powered by electricity? (preferably renewable) With cheap solar who really cares about grid power loss and associated inefficiencies? Essentially, I think it makes sense to get better at solar than to have Steve Zissou as a server admin.

Florin_Andrei 10y ago
> Salt water is highly corrosive. To metals. Not so much to plastics. > Isn't marine biology highly sensitive to heat pollution? Isn't land-based biology highly sensitive to heat pollution?
- smallnamespace 10y ago
  > Isn't land-based biology highly sensitive to heat pollution? No, land-based organisms comparatively have a much, much higher tolerance to temperature swings. Water's high heat capacity and conductivity means that most marine environments have extremely stable temperature ranges (a few degrees one way or other), so most marine species are adapted to live in only that range, and quickly die otherwise. Tropical fish are hard to keep alive precisely for this reason. Air temperature varies much more widely depending on time of day, season, and weather, so terrestrial organisms have all developed extensive strategies for thermoregulation (e.g. mammals, birds). For example, dogs can survive in both arctic and tropical environments. Plus, while heat is naturally dissipated upward, underwater thermal plumes are more likely to affect fish than above-ground plumes would affect birds. FYI, Cornell uses lake water to cool several campus buildings, and they needed to carefully review that the warmer return water wouldn't negatively affect fish [1]. [1] https://energyandsustainability.fs.cornell.edu/util/cooling/production/lsc/eis/fish.cfm https://energyandsustainability.fs.cornell.edu/util/cooling/...

frandroid 10y ago

So hum, how do you prevent your data center from being stolen.

Florin_Andrei 10y ago
Same as on land?
- sithadmin 10y ago
  Securing a datacenter from intruders on land doesn't require military-grade underwater sensor equipment and response techniques. Securing a datacenter from intruders underwater would.
  - smallnamespace 10y ago
    To be fair, it's also a lot harder to penetrate an underwater datacenter so the risk of attack is likely much lower.
- closeparen 10y ago
  I don't think the $12.50/hour staff of Allied Barton, Securitas, etc. are SCUBA-certified.
pvaldes 10y ago
Aquaculture companies working with sea cages need to hire qualified staff for exactly the same problem. Is not a minor issue.

alkonaut 10y ago

I can see the problem of delivering effective data centers to warm climates, but apart from the latency aspect, my guess is that Facebook's strategy of building a traditional mega-data center close to cheap hydro power in a region with year round cool air is more economic than this. I hope to see them succeed though, especially if the data centers can be self sustained with wind or ocean (wave, tidal, ...) power.

stephengillie 10y ago

Edit: Great points! Space would be a terrible location for data center hosting, not only due to latency and heat radiation issues, but also due to the difficulty in mitigating solar radiation. What about putting the data center in some kind of low Earth orbit? Something within the magnetic field, but far enough out to radiate heat? Would the latency still be a factor if your web server and CDN were hosted "in a cloud" on numerous communications satellites?

chc 10y ago
I'm pretty sure dissipating heat is harder in space since you don't have a relatively cool medium like air or water to dump the heat into.
tbabb 10y ago
That sounds like just about the worst place to put a datacenter. Getting just a single kilogram to orbit costs about $2000 at its absolute cheapest, so I can think of no better way to send deployment costs through the roof. On top of that, space is bad for heat exchange because there's no convective cooling. Also cosmic rays will wreck havoc on all your delicate silicon chips.
tshannon 10y ago
Someone correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe that radiating heat is actually really hard in space. It seems counter intuitive, because space is so cold, but it's mostly a vacuum. To transfer heat, you need a medium for the heat to transfer through. I believe some heat can be lost due to radiation, and so they have these big metal fins as heat sinks to radiate as much heat as possible, and reflective material on the solar facing side to prevent more heat from being absorbed. The water, on the other hand, is a fantastic absorber of heat, and I'm guessing it's easier to drop one in the ocean, rather than launch one to space.
- noir_lord 10y ago
  > I believe some heat can be lost due to radiation. In hard space all the heat is lost as radiation (minus and incredibly tiny loss from hitting the very few particles in space), the dark side can be treat as a blackbody for a rough approximation. One of the reasons that the side exposed to the sun is mirrored is to reflect as much of the radiation falling on that side as possible as the heat is so hard to get rid off, people think the shiny part is gold but it's actually usually mylar or something stacked in a layered insulation. Space is a horrible environment to make things work, metals spontaneous weld themselves (vacuum welding), radical differentials in temperature depending on orientation, your electronics are constantly hammered by high energy radiation, micro impacts by things travelling at velocities that make a sniper rifle look like a slingshot, it's fascinating as a layman what it takes to keep stuff working reliably up there at all.

walrus01 10y ago

This is cool and all, but salt water is basically cancer. If you want to experience first hand entropy at a rapidly accelerated rate, buy a boat and moor it in salt water. With all of the associated repair/maintenance costs and headaches that go with it. Now add electronics and server equipment. There are ways to use cold water for cooling without submersing things. Many of the buildings in downtown Toronto (including the 151 Front IX point and datacenter) are cooled from deep lake loop cooling/heat exchange: https://www.google.com/search?q=toronto+deep+lake+cooling&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&client=firefox-b https://www.google.com/search?q=toronto+deep+lake+cooling&ie...

jpm_sd 10y ago

This is ridiculous. Data centers contain thousands of racks like the single rack shown in the demo "pod" and they all require hands-on human maintenance from time to time. This becomes quite a bit harder when your server rack is in a sealed steel tube on the seafloor. Splitting the data center into thousands of "pods" will also greatly increase the cost of cabling and connectors for power and data distribution (we're talking $100 per connector here) and the number of cable failures will skyrocket. Did you know that fish like to chew on submarine cables? Unless you get steel-armored cables, which are defended against "fishbite"...

baking 10y ago
If one server goes down and they are not able to restore it remotely they will just write it off. If a large number go down due to some common failure, it might make sense to haul the whole thing up and refurbish it.
- cr0sh 10y ago
  I've heard that this is what many data centers currently do anyhow. That when a client "moves on" (moves out, dissolves, etc) - the machines are just left behind, because it costs more to unrack/transport/etc than it does to leave them in place. /source: worked for a small cloud computing VPS provider
randyrand 10y ago
Agreed. It makes way more sense to just build it next to an ocean and pump the water.
amygdyl 10y ago
Recent AWS presentation showed off very less dense server configurations than any commercial vendor typically offers. I guessed, i forget now if there was specific mention, that airflow simply costs a lot more than I first realized, after all i am only dumping host fan exhausts into someone else's co'lo design, which then has to deal with that. I bet it's substantially different, owning the whole building. So, what if just submerging containers or pods of servers in cold sea water, combined with unforced airflow designs, was a passive cooling possibility? After all, in theory, there's no surrounding facility to cool, and space is unlikely to be a major direct cost factor. Despite I wonder, given land reliably increases in value, whether, once land acquisition is factored out, the kind of permits and early studies might bring costs back again.(excluding design NRE) Marine insurance struck me as a important unknown. I grew up by the Channel coast in England, and i can't imagine anyone allowing heavy containers to be anchored or moored where they might break free into shipping lanes, without quite detailed study and assurances.

dougmany 10y ago

I see the makings of a great story. In 300 years, treasure hunters search for a lost data-center that drifted away in a storm.

jlgaddis 10y ago
... and sell the treasure (data) they find to advertisers?
- amygdyl 10y ago
  i am quite sure if most visitors here sat in front a randomly selected home computer, the relevancy of a message in the bottle, here, would be how fast pages render thanks to advertising networks. I took a 18 month mid-late sabbatical rolling up time owed, until last March, almost free of computing entirely, and I still cannot undo the effect i experienced, i drifted into rage ranting to an attorney friend how I had a claim for Theft Of Electricity (I think section 3 of Theft Act 80 in the E&W bit of UK) , i was so incapable of absorbing the enormity of influence. (Disclaimer I work in advertising, but printed kind, on principle. I am naturally absolutely pro advertising, but Prof Mark Ritson is worth your time infinitely more than mine, to hear views not greatly distant, how advertising agencies have ruined their own business, making online ads a deeply revolting sick joke, on them as much as readers. Readers not "users" or even "visitors". Audience if it's audio or video, certainly, and for "reach" discussion of publications identifiable by social influence creating thereby a eagerly receptive audience willing to passively consume. But Readers we are. Prof. Ritson's talks on the tube are superb, and are better at teaching what I wish every customer, let alone every small customer* or startup. I beg anyone selling anything anywhere study what that man says about the industry you may rely on for customers and livelihood. I still have Sting singing "Clickbait in a bottle" in my head... * (my foible to say customer not client, because soliciting clients is unlawful in public, sorry bad law joke intimating prostitution by who seek @clients@ when most "clients" really want to buy concretely deliverable things)
- amygdyl 10y ago
  sad to report the treasure analogy fails, if you price bulk data feeds from brokers. My suspicion is that it's simply not likely to be anyone's choice, as a talented programmer, or data scientist, or even academic in related , to work for a advertising agency, even if salaries were comparable. The difficulty of comparing salaries that's not obvious to the casual observer might inform about cultural values: agencies indeed reward strongly correlated to results. But the tendency is to create expense account lifestyles that are lavish golden handcuffs. I have known fiends reach the age they feel a family is overdue, but be unable to almost even speak at the reality their lifestyle as a single young employee would require a zero before tax, appended to their base remuneration. I don't even think that shock is so rare, but rarer since 08 certainly, as whole societies are feeling financial pressure. Adland is a perilous bubble for those possessing the greatest talents to inflate the bubble. often would fantasize at I opening a meeting with a sharp announcement, "This is a code review. You don't write software. But every line you communicate, causes a trace effect in the reality of sales for our customers (clients, but i loathe the word) We shall now begin by taking one another's client proposals and creative briefs, anonymously, and, after explaining in summary the method and action of the instruction that was acted upon by this agency, analyze the accuracy and efficiency and reliability of each part of those tasks, against this cube containing enough data to clarify sales that each action can possibly affect. ___ Oh, yes, this does happen time to time, by some value of approximately, but would you habitually demand a team confine themselves to measurable actions whose methods can be verified, classified, and show to interact properly with other job roles, few agency company cultures would not be quickly suffering. I believe as I did not long after first hired, when whiskey under the desk was far from unacceptable, barely frowned upon, that mental and emotional well being is inversely disproportional to dominant environment structure and cohesion. i.e. random makes unhappy minds. No disrespect intended towards some very goo data driven agencies i've known, but data is treated as almost anathema to advertising agencies and especially creatives. Prof Ritson laments the effect of this has been to fragment creative talent so far from the vital intrinsic of the profession, that data is maligned (and arguably more so due to systematic fraud become a openly accepted rate of $8BLN p.a.) that the cumulative effect is utter dysfunction. My own experience of trying to command data with utility in agency settings, is of oil and water that mix only when copious branded detergent ads are applied. (Because detergents are typically marketed by "under the line" advertising, coupons, direct mail (as Prof Ritson argues the web became in L.C.D. finality) where numbers are considered appropriately valuable. That was long wind talk to support a flippant view that if ad agencies knew how to use the data they are collecting, it would cost maybe more than cents in the dollar, to reliably pull complete personal records to "enrich" a website's logs. I'm talking your cell no., income, every personal aspect, recent purchases this week, diet, health data too often sold. Because it has only limited marginal value to each user, meaning advertiser or seller, for websites being direct mail then because direct mail responses hold at a single digit percentage for all i unknowingly may surmise may be a fundamental law of nature, the value of any record is held very low indeed. Yet at each passing through the system, data attaches to the record, and the probability of incredibly invasive data being available on anyone lapse even momentarily regarding their cookie oversight drifts upwards to one. Which makes astonishing detail of data perpetually anyone's for peanuts. I omitted my flippant belief that agencies are unable to learn how to use data, causing the overflow ad oversupply and undervaluation of dangerous intimate data, but the above marginal value and incremental tendency of records which rarely are pruned, accurately explains the sad real mechanism selling our privacy for oh, maybe 20 cents for a map of your life this past week... Can we not bury the ad network servers at sea? I guess that only means more latency.. If you're a startup and can find a good small agent to buy print adverts, look to the myriad association vanity magazines, that parallel vertical trade magazines. Prime positions can be had for peanuts. Amid hardly any competing advertisers. Three, last time I got a copy of The Royal Institute Of Engineers in house glossy magazine, Ingenia. (excellent read, too. Just three advertising pages. The fourth might be your company, negotiated fora couple thousand. Gales used to do the International Professional Associations Directory, which we used starting out too long ago, to broker at first by hand, pencil, HP17 and phone. Phones. Trader turrets... I think we need a law to actually throw the unthinkable mass of data out there in private company hands, too easily bought, too cheaply bought, by anyone, into the sea already. A restart with only brief amnesty.; If you did succeed in not being tracked and profiled, you'll be recorded as a infill extrapolation or pure guesswork, and i think made up data, by the wrong parties, is even more dangerous. Those incremented "enriched lists" are too easily salted. (Disclaimer: my company now works on developing we hope will allow monitoring of such data records without leaking identities of subject customers. But we'd rather not think the job is worth doing. If anyone intrepid or reckless or otherwise misguided ever desires advice how to best book pint ads for the customer, for your own use, i'd be delighted to respond best i can, email in profile)

baking 10y ago

The article doesn't mention crush pressure at depths of 200M so I'm thinking the plan is to replace the air with mineral oil which is non-conductive and absorbs heat well. But it will also mean the containers will probably not be bouyant.

Shubley 10y ago

Wouldn't it be a lot more feasible to just make the datacenter on the shore and make a liquid coolant loop that cools in the water? Like the Toronto office towers.

frozenport 10y ago
I had the same thought. Maybe temperature?

andrewguenther 10y ago

I'm surprised that they're so dismissive of heat pollution. Google's Finland data center, which is cooled by ocean water, has a holding tank used to cool the ocean water before pumping it back into the ocean[1] in order to prevent a similar problem. I would like to see additional research here rather than baselessly dismissing it. [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VChOEvKicQQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VChOEvKicQQ

Nostromov 10y ago

Lots of comments already, but 100% this is complete bullshit. If they manage to make it a diverse project (branching into other possible fields) and even if not, this is part of a cat-and-mouse game of placing live electronics for purposes of underwater warfare, espionage and such. For example smart mines that will be powered, but indistinguishable from the signature of these "server farms", then hydrophones and other such technology for locating and tracking submarines and so on. "About the Authors" makes clear how no thoughts other than the clown game were entertained by the article, but aren't we past the times that things get written about 20-30-50 years down the line. :)

wtbob 10y ago

> The reason underwater data centers could be built more quickly than land-based ones is easy enough to understand. Today, the construction of each such installation is unique. The equipment might be the same, but building codes, taxes, climate, workforce, electricity supply, and network connectivity are different everywhere. And those variables affect how long construction takes. We also observe their effects in the performance of our facilities, where otherwise identical equipment exhibits different levels of reliability depending on where it is located. In the context of the discussion about cost disease, this is quite remarkable for demonstrating how regulation and local differences have raised costs to the point that a large company is seriously considering building data centres beneath the waves.

ben_says 10y ago

I'm all for this... I think it might be one of the few ways to protect against the sun's future EMP.

biggio 10y ago

Yeah screw the environment

tomohawk 10y ago

I wonder if they would power these with DC instead of AC, given the issues of transmitting AC through underwater cables. http://www02.abb.com/global/seitp/seitp161.nsf/0/0eed46e53027b407c125708b0059213e/$file/Electrical+supply+for+offshore+by+use+of+VSC.pdf http://www02.abb.com/global/seitp/seitp161.nsf/0/0eed46e5302...

aaron695 10y ago

"I think there is a world market for maybe five computers." Amazon, Microsoft, Google. Off by two.

kristianp 10y ago

How long before our computation needs require LEO datacenters with huge solar arrays that always face the sun? Consecutive requests might be sent to different satellites as they move past. More difficult to dump heat in space.

elihu 10y ago

Seems like it would be simpler and easier to just build a datacenter near the ocean and pump seawater to it. Regardless of how it works, I wonder if it's possible to get significantly more performance out of chips that are explicitly designed to operate at a much lower maximum temperature? Let's say you want to build a datacenter somewhere like the Northern coast of Alaska or Antarctica, and you have year-round reliable and abundant access to sea water that's barely above freezing, and suppose that you're willing to order enough CPUs / GPUs / bitcoin mining ASICs or whatever to justify your supplier to design and manufacture custom chips to operate in a lower temperature range. Is there some potential boon to performance or reduced manufacturing cost (due to looser tolerances) that might make such an effort worthwhile?

akira2501 10y ago
> Is there some potential boon to performance or reduced manufacturing cost Guessing, but in the balance, I would assume no. Power generation costs are higher and service is less reliable. Staffing is more costly. Transport for all other resources is also more costly and at a much higher delay than in many other areas that are traditionally used. From my own experience with high power (~25kW) FM radio transmitters, some of which we have at the top of mountains in the middle of ski-resorts: while cooling costs are reduced throughout the winter, they /aren't/ totally eliminated, so you still need to size and maintain the equipment for summer loads anyways. Getting to the site to do work and maintenance is an absolute chore; replacing the transmitter was a 10 man job where similar rigs in other locations only required 3. Although, if it was the summer, after we finished our work, we got to take the alpine slide down the hill. As to why we put it there in the first place, signal coverage was excellent, and they already had the power we required available due to the chair-lifts being nearby. If we could have put it somewhere else and got the same coverage, we would have.

sathackr 10y ago

I really can't see the benefit of submerging these -- the complexity involved with keeping out several hundred PSI of sea water just doesn't seem to make sense to me. For the cooling aspect, they're already using pumped water and heat exchangers. What is the benefit of submersion vs just pumping sea water from a pipe to a land, or barge-based datacenter and using that to cool?

rosalinekarr 10y ago
Why does it have to be several hundred PSI? They don't have to put it at the bottom of the ocean. A shallow lake or river would work just as well.
- sathackr 10y ago
  The article mentioned that they would be between 50 and 200 meters below the surface. I assume to access the cooler waters at those depths. 50msw = 74psi 200msw = 293psi
titanomachy 10y ago
I don't think it would be that complex, since the pods can be permanently sealed and don't need to exchange matter with the environment. I would assume that a lot of the complexity in waterproofing marine vessels comes from the need for openable doors.
- sathackr 10y ago
  No doubt doors are one of the biggest challenges. Many of the challenges could be reduced or mitigated if the pods could be at least partially pressurized to reduce the pressure differential between the inside and out -- but that introduces another complexity -- can the server hardware handle it. There are quite a few engineering challenges, none of them unsolvable but also none of them seem necessary when it seems the same benefits can be obtained for less effort by keeping the pods above water.
  - 10y ago

ChuckMcM 10y ago

Imagine if you built a data center was on a river that was fed by mountain snow melt, and you created a diversion that took some of that water, ran it along heat exchangers in your racks and the out through a hydro-power unit and back into the river on the other side. You might be able to build the first negative PUE data center in the world. But you wouldn't tell anyone about it lest you lose your competitive advantage!

learc83 10y ago
The Google datacenter a few miles from my house my house is right next to the Chattahoochee river. They take water from the treatment plant that was going to be pumped into the river to use in their heat exchangers. Then they clean it and pump it into the river.

ecthiender 10y ago

Isn't it obvious and common sensical that it is a red flag to operate a data center underwater? I mean there might be short term benefits, but in the long term you'll be polluting and damaging the underwater ecosystem.

rascul 10y ago

Doesn't work. DigitalOcean has been working on this for some time and their Atlantis datacenter still isn't open. https://www.digitalocean.com/company/blog/announcing-atlantis/ https://www.digitalocean.com/company/blog/announcing-atlanti...

sgk284 10y ago
For those who might miss the date on that blog post, it's an April Fool's joke.
- dumbsecreport 10y ago
  thank you for providing a safe haven free of aprils fools trickery for all of us sensitive people
- Groxx 10y ago
  You say that, but it sounds like a win/win from where I'm sitting: >Our investigation was a great success: not only were we able to reduce our electricity costs by 35%, but we discovered our high-density SSD storage was even more dense at 87atm! Time to replicate / H2O-as-a-service it.
cpursley 10y ago
Dude, note the date. That is an April Fools joke.

tlow 10y ago

What about environmental impact?

jonbarker 10y ago

DigitalOcean should have named it "sealab".

bhauer 10y ago

Sadly, the Natick web page [1] hasn't been updated in quite some time and now has a TLS/SSL problem. [1] https://natick.research.microsoft.com/ https://natick.research.microsoft.com/

jchen11 10y ago

I would be interested knowing 1) % of total operating cost saved from cooling savings 2) % of building costs saved from standardized building and simplified regulations. Also, it wounld be awesome if we could moor these to offshore wind turbines.

drdeadringer 10y ago

Expiration of 1970s SciFi technology. I'm for it if only to rule it out. I see no problem in this R&D.

jsilence 10y ago

Why dissipate the residual heat into the environment when you could use it for residential heating and/or heating of green houses. This concept seems to be a design for waste of resources to me.

mnw21cam 10y ago
Thermodynamics. The exhaust temperature of the data centre has to be significantly higher than the temperature of the thing you want to heat, especially if that heat is to be transported any appreciable distance. Otherwise, the heat will not flow in the right direction. With data centres these days trying to keep chip temperatures as low as possible, this really makes the temperature gradient very low. An alternative would be to pump in a little bit more energy and use the exhaust heat as a source for a heat pump.
- jsilence 10y ago
  With the temperature level of a datacenter you can easily operate a heat pump with a COP of 5 to 6. Or mix in the CHP to raise temperature level to motor exhaust levels. Use the electricity for the datacenter. Lot of potential.
YokoZar 10y ago
The article mentions that data centers don't tend to be allowed near where people live for a variety of reasons.
andai 10y ago
I see a future where residential heating is powered by community owned bitcoin mining rigs.

FreekNortier 10y ago

We have found a new way to make the oceans even warmer.

z3t4 10y ago

I think it would be easier to just use solar and wind plus huge batteries.

archiides 10y ago

Would it be feasible to use the heat generated to power a stirling engine?

n2dasun 10y ago

Perhaps you could use a non-reactive medium like Green Revolution and use the seawater as a heat sink for it? http://www.grcooling.com/ http://www.grcooling.com/