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Microsoft has sunk a data centre in the sea to investigate energy efficiency
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- Qworg 8y agoHere's some more information from the blog post: https://news.microsoft.com/features/under-the-sea-microsoft-tests-a-datacenter-thats-quick-to-deploy-could-provide-internet-connectivity-for-years/ https://news.microsoft.com/features/under-the-sea-microsoft-... And here's the project site: http://natick.research.microsoft.com/ http://natick.research.microsoft.com/
- igravious 8y agoWow. That is super interesting. Thanks for sharing.
- lokopodium 8y agoIs there a benefit over just putting it in a boat/coastal building and using water (perhaps pumped from some depth) for cooling?
- fowie 8y agoPutting in on/in a boat or near the coast might get you the seawater for cooling, but the project lists a few other big benefits like oxygen-free atmosphere, constant temperatures year-round, and ease of deployment.
- Steltek 8y agoA hermetically sealed capsule can be placed on a boat just as easily as a submarine, if not easier due to the pressure difference. I'll give you the constant temperature but this project is about using the nearly-free ocean to maintain temperature so surely the delta isn't too large here. I don't see how this is easier than a boat at anchor.
- mariuolo 8y agoThe closest thing I remember is Google taking over an old paper mill in Finland that used a condenser sunk into a canal connected to the Baltic sea. https://www.wired.com/2012/01/google-finland/ https://www.wired.com/2012/01/google-finland/ there should be a video with the details here.
- brunnsbe 8y agoThere's also a data center in Helsinki, Finland that is cooled by sea water and the waste heat produced is piped via a heat pump into the district heating network. Here's a press release from 2011: http://www.investineu.com/content/atos-builds-world%E2%80%99s-most-eco-efficient-data-center-helsinki-97b5 http://www.investineu.com/content/atos-builds-world%E2%80%99...
- Maxion 8y agoThis, it feels like an awful waste to dump the heat straight into the ocean. District heating networks are a very efficient way to heat up a city, and they can be used as a place to dump excess heat. Further, we've now also got district cooling, http://basrec.net/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/District%20Cooling%20in%20Finland.pdf http://basrec.net/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/District%20Cool... [PDF warning]
- kwhitefoot 8y agoBoats in that part of the world are subject to severe stresses because of the weather. And boats are always moving, even in harbour. Just maintaining a reliable cable connection to a boat is more challenging than connecting to a subsea container. Placing the container on the sea floor avoids almost all of the weather related problems.
- Steltek 8y agoMicrowave links? How about an oil derrick style thing mounted directly to the seabed so it doesn't move? There's also plenty of coastline away from major cities. Find enough open space and it becomes feasibly multi-tenant. Add wind/solar and run a cable (or 3).
- Normal_gaussian 8y agoI'd be curious to know the specific benefits of the Orkney Isles to this project; when I hear the renewable research there being referenced (by family there, some of whom are directly involved) they always claim the major benefit is the close proximity of different underwater conditions, with some of the greatest range in tide. Yet I assume this isn't particularly useful for a datacentre of a well understood shape that doesn't intend to use the conditions to create power through novel designs.
- oh_sigh 8y agoThat's true specifically, but orkney has generally become a hub for renewables research, so the snowball effect may be in play here.
- pjc50 8y agoOrkney also has an electricity surplus due to an inadequately upgraded connection to the mainland. There's a proposed upgrade to link to the grid at the nearby Dounreay nuclear power station: https://www.ssepd.co.uk/OrkneyCaithness/ https://www.ssepd.co.uk/OrkneyCaithness/
- navs 8y agoThis can't be a new idea. Or is it that it's only now become possible to do such a thing?
- ino 8y agoI remember reading google was doing the same experiment some 10 years ago.
- partycoder 8y agoInteresting idea but the maintenance must be painful. Let's say a hard disk fails, what do you do?
- fowie 8y agoIt's a fail-in-place data center. If a hard disk fails, you don't do anything. They used to replace telephony equipment all the time too, now it's just a locked room in a building. This is pushing data centers to be more hands-off.
- 49bc 8y agoSo they don’t do anything? Eventually you’re just maintaining stacks of errored and broken computers.
- loeg 8y agoYeah. Fail in place over the service lifetime. When enough stuff is failed that it isn't worth keeping down there, you pull it up and refill it.
- 49bc 8y agoBased on the picture, "pulling it up" looks like a fairly intensive task, requiring boats, persons, etc. That kind of thing eats directly into the ROI for a datacenter. I doubt it competes with a static building with a bunch of solar panels on top.
- loeg 8y agoMight just fail-in-place, then. Although that looks pretty bad from an environmentalist perspective.
- jedberg 8y agoBy then you've replaced the datacenter and you can shift the workload and then salvage it. In theory you'd only leave it down there for three years anyway before everything in it is worth zero, at least to the IRS.
- senectus1 8y ago2016 article... but still cool! *edit, no its not, I have too many tabs open and mixed it up with the blog post listed in the comments. ignore me
- scaryclam 8y agoI think you may be thinking of something else. This was posted today, an hour ago, on the BBC.
- kbeckmann 8y agoMaybe you're thinking of https://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/01/technology/microsoft-plumbs-oceans-depths-to-test-underwater-data-center.html https://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/01/technology/microsoft-plum... ?
- cm2187 8y ago> Additionally because there are no people, we can take all the oxygen and most of the water vapour out of the atmosphere which reduces corrosion, which is a significant problem in data centres First time I hear corrosion is a problem in datacentres. I never noticed any corrosion on any machine at home or work. Does it have to do with the cooling of datacentres?
- linead 8y agoI wondered about this as well : https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Michael_Schappert/publication/224237295_Corrosion_management_for_data_centers/links/551416740cf2eda0df303ffb.pdf https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Michael_Schappert/publi... Seems like its a combination of cooling data centres (flowing air) and the quality of the air being circulated. So if there are pollutants in the air they pose a danger to the circuitry. Never occurred to me this was yet another thing to be wary of when running a data centre!
- iamshs 8y agoMaybe it is related to mitigation of sea water facilitated corrosion?
- mpweiher 8y agoI think part of it is that even problems that are small/unnoticeable at the individual level become big when multiplied by a huge N. For example, I don't think I've ever had a hard drive fail in ~30 years in computing, well without being dropped that is, yet look at the Backblaze reports: https://www.backblaze.com/blog/hard-drive-benchmark-stats-2016/ https://www.backblaze.com/blog/hard-drive-benchmark-stats-20...
- WalterBright 8y agoI have. Including things like the heads falling off and spinning around, grinding everything to junk.
- SOLAR_FIELDS 8y ago
- OnesimusUnbound 8y agoWhat would be its ecological impact?
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- OnesimusUnbound 8y agoWhat would be its ecological impact? What if there are more of these data centers?
- 49bc 8y agoInteresting idea. My hunch tells me that they’re underestimating the corrosive nature of salt water. I also wonder about vibrations, which are much more pronounced underwater. But I guess we won’t know until we try!
- mlitwiniuk 8y agoSo flooding a server starts to mean something completelly different
- fafner 8y agoImagine a future where whenever the energy price drops in a region suddenly companies show up with a bunch of such tubes drop them in the ocean. Do some batch processing and once the energy price rises they pull it out and move on. In reality of course connectivity would be a major problem and energy price differences are probably not large enough to make it viable.
- cbcoutinho 8y agoAlthough it doesn't have anything to do with computational load, hydroelectric storage exploits the change in electricity price to store energy in hydroelectric systems. At low demand they pump water into the reservoir, and at peak demand they release it again through turbines, generate electricity, and sell it at the higher price. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pumped-storage_hydroelectricity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pumped-storage_hydroelectricit...
- rdl 8y agoPowering down some facilities during temporary spikes would make sense (someday if hardware is cheap enough, operating only for peak solar generation/minimum local demand could make sense). Being able to relocate due to cost/legal/etc. over a few month period could make sense, or the special tax and planning/regulatory treatment a "ship" would get vs. a building on land.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- alexghr 8y agoAt what point does this become a problem? They're using the naturally cool sea water to regulate the temperature in the container, but that heat needs to go somewhere... it heats the water. If this becomes a popular alternative to classic server farms, at what point does it start to increase the temperature of the sea? I know, the oceans are big, but so is our data.
- Keres 8y ago> Microsoft's Ben Cutler insists the warming effect will be minimal - "the water just metres downstream would get a few thousandths of a degree warmer at most" - and the overall environmental impact of the Orkney data centre will be positive.
- sushid 8y agoWell you're making it sound as if the data centers being cooled somehow wouldn't happen otherwise. Seeing as how the alternative is to cool using A/C, surely it's the case of causing less harm than the alternative? Of course you could argue that the lower cost of this cooling method will create a larger demand for cheaper servers/data storage, which increases net harm, for which I have no answer.
- fwdpropaganda 8y ago> Of course you could argue that the lower cost of this cooling method will create a larger demand for cheaper servers/data storage, which increases net harm, for which I have no answer. That argument doensn't apply here: demand isn't currently being constrained by us being affraid of the environmental impact of datacenters.
- adrianN 8y agoedit: nevermind I can't read
- fwdpropaganda 8y agoYou don't believe demand isn't being constrained in the way I described? So you believe that people are looking at cats on facebook, and stop because they're worried about the environmental impact of facebook's datacenters? You're joking...
- brian_cloutier 8y ago> Prof Ian Bitterlin, a data centre consultant for nearly 30 years, is sceptical about the environmental impact of going underwater. > "You just end up with a warmer sea and bigger fish," he says. > And 90% of Europe's data centres are in big cities such as London and Madrid because that is where they are needed. > Microsoft's Ben Cutler insists the warming effect will be minimal - "the water just metres downstream would get a few thousandths of a degree warmer at most" - and the overall environmental impact of the Orkney data centre will be positive. Both of these opinions feel like exaggerations but I don't know enough about thermodynamics to know what the true answer is. I have a feeling that the Microsoft opinion is much closer to the truth, can anyone help me understand how I'd walk through the numbers?
- jgtrosh 8y agoNot an expert either, but this might be a good way to think about it: on land or at sea, the machines produce the same amount of heat. On land, in general, the environment around the machines will be much warmer than the desired temp. Cooling on land is in general an active affair, which has to do with generating and controlling flow of fluid and/or maybe some kind of thermic reaction. Potentially at sea being plunged in cold water is sufficient to reach the desired temp, and cooling becomes a passive affair. All in all you are trying to displace the same amount of heat but through a more efficient medium. Correct me if I'm wrong.
- brian_cloutier 8y agoOh, I'm sure that being in a cold environment and letting it passively cool you is more efficient! What I'm more unclear on is how small the impact is. It seems very likely to me that throwing the waste heat into the bottom of the ocean has less of an environmental impact than running A/C to suck out the heat and dump it into the air. However, is the impact really so small that you wouldn't notice it just meters away? That's the part I'm unclear on.
- craigds 8y agoI think so yes. Water has many times greater thermal conductivity than air, so the heat will spread out across a larger area faster. Meaning a very small (negligable) temperature increase at any given location. You wouldn't be able to detect it from a few metres away.
- 0110011 8y agoWondering how long it will be until we have cloud data centers in space... Seems like it could be useful to offer a flexible computing infrastructure to small sats and science missions without requiring ground comms.
- simon_acca 8y agoActually getting rid of excess energy is a huge problem in space since it's pretty empty: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/External_Active_Thermal_Control_System https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/External_Active_Thermal_Cont...
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- 0110011 8y agoTotally. It's the difficulties of putting lots of computing resources in space (heat, power, serviceability, radiation) that actually makes it attractive for selling compute time. Only one company needs to solve those problems and others can leverage that work for a fee. If it was easy, there wouldn't be a business opportunity.
- jbverschoor 8y agoGreat, let's boil the planet
- function_seven 8y agoThat's what they're looking to avoid, by using passive cooling instead of less efficient refrigeration.
- yani 8y agoI can see a few robotic hands doing magic under the sea while being operated remotely. Submarine drones deliver the hardware. I can see this helping MS to move into the space and a huge boost for robotics. It will get there eventually, I think the no maintenance is just to test if it is worth it before going all in
- WalterBright 8y agoI don't understand why not locating it in a city in a cold climate and using the waste heat to heat the city buildings? There is precedent. In Seattle there's the old "steam plant" which piped steam to many local buildings to heat them in winter.
- colmmacc 8y agoThis may be more common than is often realized. Also in Seattle, we (Amazon) use heat from the Westin colo/datacenter to heat some of our office buildings ... https://www.greenmatters.com/news/2017/11/22/Z2tmzwQ/amazon-seattle-data-center-heat https://www.greenmatters.com/news/2017/11/22/Z2tmzwQ/amazon-... About ten years ago, before working at Amazon, my last job involved building a datacenter in Leiden, the Netherlands. There the city has a municipal heat exchange program and we could also vent the excess heat to be used for heating water. Modern data centers, especially for Cloud services, are really really really big though ... so big that they have specialized real estate and power requirements. The locations where you can get that much power, and that much space, tend to be outer sub-urban or quite remote. In those locations, there are few consumers for excess heat so more effort goes into reclaiming the energy loss through other means.
- pjc50 8y agoCity heat requires building out quite a bit of infrastructure, then in summer you still have to get rid of it without pumping it through the buildings. Even Inverness doesn't really need heat in summer.
- bausshf 8y agoHi Walter. Also. I'm assuming it has to do with distribution and reliability within regions, hence why you even need datacenters at different locations and not just one location.
- dwyerm 8y agoYou're talking about District Heating[1], and that's been around for decades in hundreds of cities. It's the source of the steaming manhole covers that are a fixture of noir imagery. Denver's got the oldest continually operating system in the world, and within the last decade or so, they added a cooling loop, as well. Instead of a boiler and a cooling tower, you can subscribe to a steam loop and a chiller loop. The problem is once again of gradient. It makes thermodynamic sense to pipe steam around, because of the large gradient between steam and ambient. But servers don't make steam. At best they make warm water only a couple of dozen degrees over ambient... and warm water doesn't have enough energy to heat buildings very effectively. That said, and as someone already mentioned, people are doing it anyway. Seattle's internet exchange pipes its water across the street to the Amazon towers[2]. BTW, Seattle's Georgetown steam plant might not be making steam any more, but the one down by the market is still operating as Emwave Seattle[3]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/District_heating https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/District_heating [2] https://blog.aboutamazon.com/sustainability/the-super-efficient-heat-source-hidden-below-amazons-new-headquarters https://blog.aboutamazon.com/sustainability/the-super-effici... [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seattle_Steam_Company https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seattle_Steam_Company
- choonway 8y agoI don't think this is done for the sake of efficiency, but rather latency. For example, if you had a underwater data center that sat in the middle of the atlantic ocean in between new york and london, you could do some serious trading with that capability.
- Nican 8y agoEven in the coast of large cities, like NYC or Boston. The real state cost of having a data center in those regions are high, but it would be much cheaper to just hide your servers underwater, near where your users are.
- wpdev_63 8y agoThis is a big reason. The cost of leasing out space is definitely more expensive than the cost of cooling these datacenters. Why spend several million dollars in leasing space when you can drop a datacenter capsule off the coast with free cooling? Who cares about the cost of hardware.
- hinkley 8y agoSo you’re going to put servers in a public waterway and you don’t think the US Government is going to have a word with you about it? You’re going to pay even if it doesn’t have a street address.
- dmurray 8y agoNo, you could not. You would gain nothing over having a datacentre in London and a datacentre in New York and a low latency link between them. You can note, for example, that there is no data centre half way between Chicago and New York, even though that area has cheap accessible real estate and billions of dollars have been spent on low latency communication links between the two.
- nomercy400 8y agoPutting your datacenter in international waters, without laws or regulations, hidden from the world. Such a great way to do things without people knowing, or having people do things about it. Power it with offshore windmills, and you really only need a network connection. Great idea though, using water to cool your datacenter and leaving all the oxygen out.
- dogma1138 8y agoMaritime law; there is no such thing as international waters for “stuff” each vessel has to fly under a flag. The MSFT Datacenter is a vessel under law, if they don’t want to fly it under a flag they’ll have to essentially abandon it and then salvage laws come into play.
- freeflight 8y agoIn that context, the Internets fascination with pirates makes a whole new level of sense. Servers, classified as marine vessels, admins being literal captains sailing under flags. In a more fun world, one of those vessels would fly the Jolly Rogers and host a certain infamous Swedish bay.
- talltimtom 8y agoWhy would the physical location of the server matter with respect to people knowing what you are doing? I have no idear where googles servers are when I fire off a search for cute cats in boxes, yet I still know what it’s doing. As for “without laws” google still follows European laws even if my search happens to be handled on an American or British machine. You obey the laws where you operate not where your server is located.
- cinquemb 8y agoFor companies who are already complying with laws in whatever jurisdiction I'd have to agree with what you are saying. But if the economics in the future make sense on some level, I could see criminal enterprises interested in exploring things like this. If narco's are building/using submarines now, I could see them managing/tracking/monitoring a global logistics from their sunken data centers (they'll need to find other ways to power and transmit/receive, because I doubt they could just hook up their cables directly onshore anywhere, setting aside being an easy choke-point to cut access). Maybe future narcos, illegal EU personal data miners/brokers, pirates or who else for whatever could be interested, esp if the fixed cost of operating stuff now/future > operating/ future sunken data centers and probability/cost of seizure now/future > probability/cost with future sunken datacenters?
- AnnoyingSwede 8y agoBit of clickbate there.. Thought this was about them buying Github ;)
- polvs 8y agoWe have been following this since Microsoft launched project Natick in 2015[1]. Comupting has a large effect on our planet, data centers consume over 6% of the world's electricity (more than India) and generate over 4% of the world's CO2 emmissions (twice that of commercial air-travel)[2]. The approach taken by Microsoft is a nice PR-stunt but we think it's impractical/difficult to carry out maintenance and leads to a very expensive TCO. FWIW we believe immersion cooling is the most practical approach to reduce energy needs of hungry data centers and still allow them to be situated where they are needed and enable the re-usage of heat. As a shameless plug, I am the co-founder of https://submer.com https://submer.com . [1] We covered this in our blog (https://submer.com/microsoft-testing-undersea-immersion-cooling/ https://submer.com/microsoft-testing-undersea-immersion-cool...) [2] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/feb/20/much-work-needed-to-make-digital-economy-environmentally-sustainable https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/feb/20/much-wor...
- tomglynch 8y agoHi Polvs, I believe we met in Berlin. I hadn't seen immersion cooling before then but was absolutely impressed. Unfortunately setup costs are quite restrictive, but for large scale organisations it does make sense.
- polvs 8y agoHi Tom, I think I remember you from the C3 Crypto Conference where we had a booth. I know what you mean, the initial cost of acquiring this technology compared to regular air cooling technologies is more expensive in the very short term, but when you consider the operational costs of electricity, the ROI can be under a year. It becomes much more interesting when you also factor in that you can pack >4x computing power into the same physical space saving a lot of real estate and don't need the huge CAPEX in expensive prepared server rooms nor plan ahead the “hot-spots”.
- ksec 8y agoWhy hasn't this taken up pace though? I am pretty sure I read about immersive cooling at least 4 -5 years ago. And 3M had some new "liquid" shown 1 - 2 years ago. Given the scale of which now Google, Amazon, Microsoft and Apple operate, surely they should be the first one to adopt? Edit: Looks like I asked the question a while ago. From Anandtech and Servethehome: 10 years ago, liquid had a thermal limit. Now it is around 5x that old limit. Problem is cost ($$$/gallon of the liquid) and installation. Has to be marketed on TCO. Also, issues with submerged fiber connections 2U air cooling can reliably handle 8x 200w+ TDP CPUs, 600w of NVMe, plus RAM and add-in cards. 4U designs can handle 6kW of cooling on air. Liquid may be more efficient, and more data centers are being built for it, but air is easy to deploy.
- Redoubts 8y agoSome non-environmental reasons for wanting to do this: http://www.alexwg.org/publications/PhysRevE_82-056104.pdf http://www.alexwg.org/publications/PhysRevE_82-056104.pdf > Optimal intermediate trading node locations for all pairs of 52 major securities exchanges, calculated using Eq. 9 as midpoints weighted by turnover velocity... While some nodes are in regions with dense fiber-optic networks, many others are in the ocean or other sparsely connected regions.
- shoo 8y ago# Full fathom six thy server sits; # Of its disks are coral made; # Those are pearls that were its bits # Nothing of it that doth fade # But doth suffer sea-migrations # Into substrate for crustaceans. # Sea-nymphs monitor system vigour: # Hark! HEALTH CHECK: FAILURE -- replacement trigger'd
- adzicg 8y agoThis opens quite an interesting perspective for 'off-shore' hosting, literally. I remember from a previous gig a while ago that renting servers in Saskatchewan or something similar provided companies with a favourable legislation as well as cheaper server cooling. If you plunge a data centre into the middle of the sea somewhere in international waters, does it really fall under any legislation?
- jusssi 8y agoNo legislation cuts both ways. Be prepared to fend off pirates and state actors attempting to claim free loot.
- philip1209 8y agoWhat's the average lifetime of a data center? I wonder how the enclosure for this underwater one compares, and whether it's comparable.
- thedancollins 8y agoFor years we've used water to cool our CPUs ... what happens if we drop the entire datacenter into water?
- chrisseaton 8y agoWhy are you just restating the question of the article?
- floor_ 8y agoReminds me of that NOC +10 ARG and the first Bioshock.
- nabla9 8y agoIf you want maximum energy efficiency, build city centers in cold climates where the excess heat can be used. Yandex has data center in city of Mäntsälä, Finland and they provide 50 percent of the heating needs. Even more advanced concept, combined district heating and cooling. With combined district heating and cooling and integrate data centers into them. Data center heat can be used in cold regions for heating. Combined heat pump/chiller units can produce both heat and cooling at the same time. Sea water (trough absorption chillers) is used for cooling apartments, offices and data centers. Heat from data centers, purified waste water, etc. is used for heating apartments. During winter more heat is utilized. During summers more water cooling is utilize. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2010/jul/20/helsinki-data-centre-heat-homes https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2010/jul/20/helsinki... Suvilahti Data Centre New Build Case Study: Operationalizing District Heating and Cooling in large Data Centre in Former Electricity Station http://www.energy-cities.eu/IMG/pdf/WS2_Helsinki.pdf http://www.energy-cities.eu/IMG/pdf/WS2_Helsinki.pdf https://www.helen.fi/en/company/energy/energy-production/power-plants/katri-vala-heating-and-cooling-plant/ https://www.helen.fi/en/company/energy/energy-production/pow... COMBINED DISTRICT HEATING AND COOLING https://www.euroheat.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/Case-study-Helsinki-GDECA15.pdf https://www.euroheat.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/Case-stu... District Heating & Cooling in Helsinki http://www.iea.org/media/workshops/2013/chp/markoriipinen.pdf http://www.iea.org/media/workshops/2013/chp/markoriipinen.pd...
- comboy 8y agoIt's all very clever, but think about the cost and complexity. Installations, management, real estate, physical security etc. I'm quite confident that even making optimal use of the excess heat you would end up with less money than with their solution. I don't think companies want maximum energy efficiency. They want maximum cost efficiency.
- vortico 8y agoExactly, cooling is expensive but not as much as human resources. With a sinkable data center, you could put it next to any coastal or riverside city.
- 8y ago
- zerop 8y agoAnd what would the effect on life in Water or environment affect of the same.
- sp0ck 8y agoI wonder what will be algae/flora impact on a heat exchange after year or two. This thing will be warm and stationary so it will became overgrown really fast.
- faleidel 8y agoWe could look at hydrothermal vents to see the effect of heat source underwater.
- wlesieutre 8y agoThe heat from hydrothermal vents on its own wouldn't support ecosystems in deep water, they also feed out various useful chemicals and nutrients. The base of these foodchains is creatures that can build biological carbon stuff using chemical energy from that instead of using light, called "chemosynthesis". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chemosynthesis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chemosynthesis
- almostarockstar 8y agoI imagine the first step would be to use standard marine anti-foul paint on the exchangers. But that only works for a few months at best. After that, I'm not so sure. Perhaps a slow, continuous movement of an exchange surface past a hard surface would do the trick. When this stuff is young, it's easily wiped away, but once it's there for a while you get real problems.
- IcceFogHackers 8y agoHacking is made easy with Alex. Charges are afordable, time is very fast and the job is always on point. Should you want to hack a Whatsapp account, Instagram, Snapchat, Facebook, Skype, Twitter, Viber and so on, you want to edit your school grades, you want to clear a criminal record, just contact my hacker through (icehackerzz@gmail.com) or via Whatsapp +1347-443-9188 and get our job done asap.
- jc763 8y agoBrilliant.
- tomxor 8y agoAs an aside in the article: > There has been growing concern that the rapid expansion of the data centre industry could mean an explosion in energy use. But Emma Fryer, who represents the sector at Tech UK, says that fear has been exaggerated. > "What's happened is we've had the benefit of Moore's Law. The continued advances in processing power have made doom-laden predictions look foolish" There may be other reasons that energy efficiency will continue to improve, but Moore's law, (More specifically in relation to performance per watt: Dennard Scaling), has long been at an end. Given her position it's fairly ignorant to sight this as a reason for a continued lower proportion of energy consumption growth by now.
- JacobJans 8y ago> In a normal year, demand for electric power in Chelan County grows by perhaps 4 megawatts — enough for around 2,250 homes — as new residents arrive and as businesses start or expand. But since January 2017, as Bitcoin enthusiasts bid up the price of the currency, eager miners have requested a staggering 210 megawatts for mines they want to build in Chelan County. That’s nearly as much as the county and its 73,000 residents were already using. Source: http://www.thenewstribune.com/news/business/article212008409.html http://www.thenewstribune.com/news/business/article212008409...
- cc-d 8y ago> There has been growing concern that the rapid expansion of the data centre industry could mean an explosion in energy use. But Emma Fryer, who represents the sector at Tech UK, says that fear has been exaggerated. If we're concerned about the technology industry vastly increasing energy consumption, lets look at the entire medium sized country's worth of energy bitcoin is consuming for absolutely useless calculations.
- ethbro 8y agoIn the same vein, I'd be curious how much energy gets consumed by HFT.
- wglb 8y agoAnd how much by machinery to run advertising?
- monochromatic 8y agoI would think far less. HFT isn’t intentionally computationally expensive.
- foobarchu 8y agoAnd the HFT industry is incentivized to use as little processor time as possible, and thus as little power as possible.
- kulu2002 8y agoWould have loved to see FMEA done for this project. From both environment and Data centre point of view.
- sbhn 8y agoSeems like a good way to create a new country. The country of Microsoft. Go easy on me down voters, I’m just imagining it from the perspective of China, Russia, North Korea, Syria, Iran, Cuba, Libya or Canada doing the same thing and the controversy that would follow.
- kyleperik 8y agoOn a totally non-serious note: Just reading "Microsoft has sunk a data centre" sounds pretty hilarious given recent events (GDPR, acquiring GitHub)
- the_arun 8y agoI think we should spend more "energy" on reducing the heat in the datacenter and solve the problem for everyone. Cooling the datacenter in the sea seems like a hacky (though creative) solution.
- nashashmi 8y agoLaser based cooling systems is where we should put our focus.
- ryanmarsh 8y agoWell now we have a plan for boiling the oceans: Bitcoin mining + underwater data centers
- bhagone 8y agoLots of energy used in storing the data may not always produce effective results.
- amatai 8y agoWell everyone is talking about the energy usage, which is the point of the experiment. But what happens after 5 years (the expected life of the datacenter). Most of the computers in there will be worthless then. Will they bring up the datacenter and reload it with new equipment? Will the cost-benefit be in favor of re-equipment or just sink a new one in? If its going to be cheaper to just drop a new one in, we will have ocean floor littered with dead datacenters. Haven't heard anything about this.
- _bxg1 8y agoI'm sure the environmental impact of this one unit will be negligible, but if the worlds largest tech companies start deploying thousands of these - imaginable, since it's a pretty good idea from an engineering perspective - I could see that causing some real problems.
- decebalus1 8y ago> I could see that causing some real problems Can you be more specific? What type of problems and why? Temperature-related, waste related, hazardous substances? And why would this become a problem at-scale?
- _bxg1 8y agoProf Ian Bitterlin, a data centre consultant for nearly 30 years, is sceptical about the environmental impact of going underwater. "You just end up with a warmer sea and bigger fish," he says. The reason I think it could become a problem at-scale is, again, because it's a great idea from an engineering perspective. Cheap land, cheap cooling, space-efficient (no need for human amenities in the building, like walking space and bathrooms and security checkpoints). I could imagine a scenario a decade or two down the road when most of the world's data centers are dumped off the coasts, at which point there would likely be impact. Setting aside the heat, there's the widespread disruption of the sea floor. Also, while some companies might take environmental precautions, I'm sure that others would not. Why would you bother spending the money to salvage a pod in the case of a tank breach or a fire? It's far from the biggest environmental concern we have, and it could be done with minimal impact if those doing it cared enough, but in my experience large companies won't go to any expense that doesn't make or save them money.
- CodeSheikh 8y agoAt first I read it as "Microsoft has sunk GitHub in the sea...". Sigh my brain is trained to see MS+GitHub wherever I read a news article about MW or GH as a result of all the hype for past two days.
- sathackr 8y agoI wonder why they are submerging these instead of just making them a floating barge. I can't imagine submersion is significantly better for cooling, the energy density very likely already requires a circulating water system, and the added issues dealing with the pressure at depth seem risky. Possibly there is a benefit not related to cooling. Perhaps weather/waves? Things are probably alot calmer 30ft below the surface. The tossing and turning on the surface may place additional streses on things like HDD spidles.
- djtriptych 8y agoHDD spindles????
- sathackr 8y agoSpinning hard drives have a decent gryoscopic effect. Hold one while it's powered up and try rotating it in a manner that would change the plane of the platters and you will feel the resistance. Each time you do that, it puts a slight load on the spindle bearings. Do it repeatedly on a varying 5-30 second cycle and you'll simulate what a harddrive on a boat or barge in the open water would experience. I can imagine that would create additional wear and tear and contribute to an increased failure rate.
- djtriptych 8y agoRight but who is deciding to use spinning hard drives instead of SSDs in an underwater data center?
- dorfsmay 8y agoI wish somebody worked on using that unwanted heat, like they do in swimming pool / ice rink combos, rather than finding ways to just disperse it faster in the environment.
- cpeterso 8y agoArthur C. Clarke wrote a short story about an power generator based on the temperature difference of a long pipe reaching into the cold ocean depths. I think the story was The Deep Range.
- sbarre 8y agoToronto cools some of the larger office buildings downtown by pulling in cold water from the bottom of Lake Ontario. http://www.acciona.ca/projects/construction/port-and-hydraulic-works/deep-lake-water-cooling-system/ http://www.acciona.ca/projects/construction/port-and-hydraul...
- reaperducer 8y agoOr perhaps heating a greenhouse in a cold climate where fresh food is expensive or impossible to import.
- remir 8y agoI wonder if the water would be hot enough for a thermal bath/spa?
- adrianmonk 8y agoIt's tough in hot climates. There's plenty of heat to go around. And there are lots of people who live in hot climates who, for latency reasons, need servers near them. Thus there are kind of two cases to solve for. You can stick a data center in Northern Europe, and that heat might be valuable enough that your approach could be to try to reclaim it. If you stick a data center in Singapore, you'd better focus on generating less heat in the first place or finding better ways to get rid of it.
- 8y ago
- nashashmi 8y agoI am most concerned about the data cable getting cut by ships. Don't know why nobody else here is concerned about that.
- haldean 8y agoBecause most of the internet already goes through under-sea cables? We're pretty good at not cutting under-sea cables.
- sbr464 8y agoWhat happens in a large body of water (ocean etc) when an electric shock accidentally slips out or a live electric cable is cut? Is it similar to an underwater grenade going off, affecting a large area, or is it not a worry?
- MajorSauce 8y agoElectricity finds the path of least resistance. If that power cable would be completely cut, the electricity would spark from one of the pole of the cable to the other, until some breaker shuts the thing off. Even at great energy, the impact would be minimal.
- badblade 8y agonew snorkelling destination
- parliament32 8y ago> It will not be possible to repair the computers if they fail This is the part that concerns me the most. Pretty much all DCs have multiple 24/7 staff to deal with hardware failures and equipment swaps... telling a client "you can't access your hardware for 5 years" wouldn't go over too well.
- ghostly_s 8y agoWell, you clearly wouldn't lease dedicated hardware with this model. You just redistribute load amongst data pods when there is a failure, and pull the whole pod from service for refurbishment once it passes your total failure threshold.
- acdha 8y agoThink about it in a cloud model where you aren’t renting a server you know by name. Imagine running something like object storage or FaaS where the cloud provider handles everything behind the scenes and can failover at any time without you seeing more than perhaps a few failed requests. In that model, hardware failing is just a factor in total overhead cost. If the hardware doesn’t fail immediately it might be cheaper to leave a dead node in the rack than to pay a human to touch it, especially if they’ve already recouped a significant percentage of the purchase cost by the time it fails. Over the life of a server the cost of cooling is enough that a substantial savings will push that breakeven point earlier.
- yarrel 8y agoMicrosoft boiling the oceans is a positive move for environmentalism, hybrid owners agree.
- josiahtu 8y agodata syncing
- DoubleCribble 8y agoIf clusters of these tanks are eventually deployed, it could have some surprising effects on local marine life and might be a good way to jumpstart a marine preserve. [0] [0]https://www.abcactionnews.com/news/local-news/clusters-of-manatees-spotted-at-tecos-big-bend-power-plant-keeping-warm-from-cold-weather https://www.abcactionnews.com/news/local-news/clusters-of-ma...
- outworlder 8y ago> This is a tiny data centre compared with the giant sheds that now store so much of the world's information, just 12 racks of servers but with enough room to store five million movies. How much is that in Library of Congress units? This trend of not giving out data but appearing to do so is strange.
- fowie 8y ago"The Phase 2 datacenter can house 27.6 petabytes of data." Assuming you're using 15TB as one LoC unit, then about 1,800 LoCs.
- badatusernames 8y ago<sarcasm>Haha, Microsoft, you sunk a data center and now you think you can run Github.</sarcasm>