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Project Natick – Underwater datacenter with live cameras
- xyproto 8y agoFew companies could and would throw money at a project like this. Environmentally friendly datacenters are needed.
- joering2 8y agoSomething tells me that thausands of heat exchangers where you produce hot and exachange it for cold, at the bottom of oceans which already are recording highest temperatures in modern history, is not much of envrionment friendly.
- hazbot 8y agoI would be very surprised if the waste heat had any significant impact more than a few meters/yards from the container. Water has a really high heat capacity and the oceans are large. Almost all the energy that is heating up the ocean is coming from the sun - we've just put a thicker blanket round the earth to trap more heat. Waste heat from human activity is a tiny part of the global energy balance.
- eeZah7Ux 8y agoDumping heat in the ocean is not environmentally friendly. That heat could have been used to heat up buildings.
- xyproto 8y agoAlmost all the energy we have, ultimately comes from the sun. As long as we can covert energy in a clean way, there is nothing inherently environmentally unfriendly about spending energy on one thing that could have been used for another thing.
- HappyRobot 8y agoYes, but we need to be careful when we discharge excess heat. The sudden addition of unnatural heat can be an issue for ocean ecosystems. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermal_pollution https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermal_pollution
- Hysterisis 8y agoSeems like it would be really annoying to service if something breaks and needs to be replaced.
- kerng 8y agoI'd imagine they would want to build this cheap enough to just replace the entire thing when something goes wrong. Anything else seems very impractical.
- Qworg 8y agoIt fails in place, then you replace the internals every five years as a single unit. After 20 years, you recycle the whole thing.
- pandapower2 8y agoGuess you would just remotely disable any part that breaks. Once enough stuff has broken you just replace the whole thing. Designing it would be a little bit like designing something that is going into space. You'd need to be very confident in your ability to remotely manage it over a long time frame.
- wpdev_63 8y agoThey're going to save soo much money not having to lease space in major cities along the coast because of this. Hardware is pennies on the dollar in comparison.
- cm2187 8y agoI'd assume you still need a small datacentre close to it, i.e. on the cost, for routing, backup generators, maintenance, etc.
- flyingfences 8y ago"Small" being the operative word. A room vs. a building.
- cm2187 8y agoWell, that depends on your definition of small. This is what I believe the diesel generators of a typical datacentre look like (+fuel tanks): http://www.dchuddle.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/Backup-generators_LC.jpg http://www.dchuddle.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/Backup-ge...
- nashashmi 8y agoThe leasing cost is buying land (ammortized over 30 years) + maintaining land and then compare it against buying specialized equipment, hardware, and maintenance staff for underwater projects. I guess with scale, the price goes down.
- michaelbuckbee 8y agoI'd imagined that it was a shipping container on floats, but it's a pressure vessel (keep that seawater out) filled with nitrogen (to stop corrosion).
- weego 8y agoSo where does the heat go? Judging from the FAQ my assumption is it's transferring it into the surrounding water? How many of these before it starts becoming a local ecological problem?
- on_and_off 8y agoI know that Google also has water based installations where there are basins to let the water cool down before it is reinjected into the local system.
- sschueller 8y agoIt makes more sense to heat things that need heat. For example we have a few public pools heated by datacenters [1]. Alternatively you can also heat homes like they do with the heat generated from burning trash. [2] [1] https://www.tecchannel.de/a/oeffentliches-hallenbad-von-rechenzentrum-beheizt,1753126 https://www.tecchannel.de/a/oeffentliches-hallenbad-von-rech... [2] http://www.kezo.ch/technik/produkte/ http://www.kezo.ch/technik/produkte/
- AlanSE 8y agoThere is dramatically more heat capacity in the ocean than in the atmosphere. Many power plants reject heat directly to the ocean, and clearly they do produce a local hotspot, which is much argued over by ecologists. There can be some valid local ecological concerns. If it emits into a spot which is particular important to some species it can become a problem. It can also create ecological activities, where some species congregate around the outlet because they want the hotter water. This isn't necessary good, but again, it's a local occurrence. Globally, using ocean water for cooling is almost always ecologically better, simply because it's more efficient than alternatives that are either constrained in terms of the usable volume flow of water, or must use a less efficient medium for heat transfer. Eventually, all heat we produce will be radiated into space, but if an activity indirectly produces greenhouse gases, then it warms by a very large multiplier compared to its direct heat production.
- logicallee 8y agoYou seem to have a good understanding of this subject. Could you explain to someone who is much less well-versed, why it matters if some species has an important area that it can't go to anymore and, say, stops producing in that area? (Goes somewhere else.) I mean is it some great tragedy not to have some species in some particular place? I want to kind of add a disclaimer to my question. At the limits of course I am not questioning ecological conservation - the Earth would both suck if it only had humans and our crops and livestock in it, and be thrown completely out of equilibrium so that it would suck for humans too. But I assume that the effect you're talking about is where over time some tiny little place becomes bad for some species, so they stop going to just that one place. Likewise you mentioned the opposite effect where "It can also create ecological activities, where some species congregate around the outlet because they want the hotter water" but this doesn't seem like some objectively great thing - wow, we have all these fish hanging around what amounts to a thermal spa for them, fantastic - but more like just a neutral fact. This is my impression, that it is what it is, so I'd just like an explanation of the strong moral component or why this is important - since you seem to understand this. (Again, I can do part of the reasoning myself since obviously I wouldn't choose a barren lifeless planet with only humans and stuff we eat, on it, I'm just having trouble extending this reasoning to tiny local perturbations.)
- Animats 8y agoIt's intended to run without maintenance for five years. That's been tried before. InfoSeek did it in the early days of search engines. They didn't repair machines; the entire module of some number of racks was replaced at end of life. But that idea seems to have fallen out of fashion. That Microsoft is trying this again is significant. It's running in dry nitrogen. That has advantages over air. No corrosion, for one.
- Havoc 8y agoIs it just me or does that website load insanely slowly?
- opan 8y agoWow, yeah. I counted out 16 seconds. I'm using umatrix, so I was starting to think I'd just blocked something needed for the site to load by default, but decided to give it a bit just in case.
- nullify88 8y agoSo many fish visible on the live cameras. I suppose the container surface has become a source of food for the local ecosystem now.
- imhoguy 8y agoVery interesting biology and physics project. I wonder how the layer of life building up on the warm surface will affect the heat flow.
- EamonnMR 8y agoIf you drop anything interesting he ocean it will become a rich ecosystem. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_reef https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_reef
- sathackr 8y agoStill don't see the benefit of submerging and dealing with all of the engineering challenges that causes. At 240kw of power consumption, that level of energy density must be using some sort of forced air/water cooling system. So if you're already pumping/circulating the water from outside, what is the benefit of submersion? Why not just float it on the surface?
- ygra 8y ago> So if you're already pumping/circulating the water from outside »Natick datacenters consume no water for cooling or any other purpose.« (From the FAQ) I guess if you're able to get the heat to the outer walls, then being submerged in water should take care of the cooling for you, without the need to pump in ocean water and circulate it.
- sathackr 8y agoRecirculating the water wouldn't be considered consuming. They do have flat plate heat exchangers, commonly used on boats and either in direct contact with the water, or bonded to the hull, that have a closed loop cooling system to conduct the heat to the water. But submersion of the entire vessel isn't needed for this to be effective, just sufficient surface area in contact with water to effectively disperse the heat. There are many safer ways to do this than submersion. I will do the calculations later but I don't believe even the entire surface of the submersed data center would be sufficient to disperse the heat using natural convection and conduction. It takes 1000s of feet of submersed(or buried) tubing to effectively reject the heat in common geothermal/lake source home cooling systems, and they are typically in the 60,000 btu range(~18kw) A submerged heat exchanger in a closed loop cooling system seems like a much better solution, if the reason for submersion is cooling related.
- Qworg 8y agoWeather.