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Microsoft's underwater data centre resurfaces after two years
- wrkronmiller 6y agoIt would be nice to see some numbers on energy used to power this versus a regular set of servers. Also nice if they discussed the energy/cost involved with deploying and retrieving these capsules and how well that would amortize if this became a commercial solution.
- zweifuss 6y agoFrom https://natick.research.microsoft.com/ https://natick.research.microsoft.com/ Phase 1 demonstrated the feasibility of the subsea datacenter concept, including our ability to remotely operate a Lights Out datacenter* for long periods of time, operating with a highly efficient PUE (power usage effectiveness is total power divided by server power; lower values are better, 1.0 is perfect) of 1.07, and using no water at all, for a perfect WUE (water usage effectiveness is the liters consumed per megawatt of power per minute; lower values are better, 0 is best) of exactly 0 vs land datacenters which consume up to 4.8 liters of water per kilowatt-hour. For Phase 2, our goals are to: Develop one full scale prototype subsea datacenter, which could be used as a modular building block to aggregate subsea datacenters of arbitrary size Gain an understanding of the economics of undersea datacenter TCO (total cost of ownership is the full lifetime cost of a datacenter including manufacture, deployment, operations, and recovery) should we proceed to commercial deployment.
- mips_avatar 6y agoIt seems an additional hurdle is anti-fouling. Those barnacles and algae act as an insulator, making the cold-water cooling advantage less and less of an advantage.
- mc32 6y agoMaybe there’s a temp at which it’s too warm for barnacles —question is can the systems within operate at that temperature?
- morsch 6y agoThe system within would have to operate at a (considerably) higher temperature, since there's a temperature gradient involved and the place where the barnacles are is the coolest part of the whole structure.
- OldHand2018 6y agoMaybe they will release some cooling data that quantifies the effect!
- endtime 6y agoIf the surface were that hot, would sea creatures still want to live on it? I have no idea what their range of tolerance is, but I'd assume that they're well adapted for living on relatively cool rocks. And if it's not that hot, then it seems like there's not a cooling problem. (To be clear, I'm speculating without any real knowledge of this subject, and welcome the inevitable corrections.)
- Etheryte 6y agoThe ocean is host to a very wide number of creatures and bacteria, some live in arctic cold waters, others on volcanic vents, and every range in between. There's a good saying for this, roughly translated, that nature doesn't love an empty spot — if one type of plant or bacteria won't live in an area, someone else will quickly settle in.
- shuntress 6y agoI am familiar with that sentiment expressed through the phrase "nature abhors a vacuum"
- smaddox 6y agoThe irony is that this phrase predates the Torricelli experiment, in which he used a glass vial and mercury to produce a vacuum, and the eventual discovery that the vast majority of nature is a vacuum (outside of the atmosphere of planets and stars).
- freehunter 6y agoAnd if it wasn‘t for gravity, everything inside the atmosphere of planets and stars would be rushing to fill that vacuum. Nature abhors a vacuum, but that‘s only tempered by the fact that there are more powerful forces than vacuums.
- skosch 6y ago
- hangonhn 6y agoIs that really still an issue? From my understanding, it's sort of a solved problem. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-AdW030xQB4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-AdW030xQB4
- Hnrobert42 6y agoThat’s a cool video with interesting information, but I don’t think the conclusion from it that fouling is a solved issue.
- mojomark 6y agoYou're correct, as a marine engineer, I can tell you that the biofouling problem is far from solved. To date, copper biocide works best, but is terrible for the environment. A lot of the new coatings are also 'speed-release', meaning the hull must travel a certain speed in the water before the biofouling simply falls off. Obviously for a hull that site stagnant in the water, like Natick, this type of coating won't help. Many people have tried to solve the issue passivly, and even tried mimicking shark skin (tiny chevron-shaped scales) at the microscale to minimized biological growth's ability to "latch" to the material surface. However, I haven't seen any good commercially viable progress in practice. I'm not sure how the MS Natick's cooling system works, but if it's anything like a ship, the heat transfer surface is NOT typically the skin of the hull (although keel coolers are essentially that, but I don't see keel coolers on the Natick hull). Instead, ship cooling systems typically suck in the virtually endless supply of cold seawater, run it through a heat exchanger (often a plate type), generally with a feshwater loop on the other side that runs to hardware to be cooled. The servers would be cooled by this fresh chillwater loop. The above system only works if a.) you have much excess cool seawater than heat infusion (i.e. you're not trying to cool a large server farm in a stationary pond or small lake), and b.) You have means to clean the biofouling that will occur on the seawater side of the heat exchanger if left unabated. The latter, as indicated by reduced cooling capacity, may be why MS needed to stop the project 3 years shy of the objective completion date.
- nomel 6y agoI can't imagine a field of these (which I assume is the eventual goal), covered in biocides, would be that great for the environment.
- Const-me 6y agoThe container is huge, and the insulation by algae is not that good. Anti-fouling matters for boats because increases energy consumption when it sails. Pretty sure for the datacenter it only contributes to a few degrees C.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- sandworm101 6y ago>> Those barnacles and algae act as an insulator Maybe not. Barnacles probably conduct heat at a similar rate to water. And they create a rougher surface with greater contact area to the surrounding water. And some of them actively filter water, push it around. Perhaps having a layer of barnacles woudl increase cooling.
- morei 6y agoThe cooling nature of water comes from the high specific heat _and_ the fluid mixing (convection currents, pumped flow, etc). Barnacles and other accretive life forms means that the thermal gradient drops sharply, and hence the heat flow rate drops significantly. Take a comparison is between (say) 25C heatsink in contact with 10C water across a boundary layer that likely on the order of 10mm thick, versus what is effectively a static fluid ~50mm thick followed by the same boundary layer. So the unmixed fluid is going to be ~6x [1] thicker, for a heat flow rate 1/6th the original. And that's assuming that barnacles do in fact conduct as well as water, something that's unlikely (water is ~0.6, human flesh ranges from ~0.2 to ~0.5) [1] Insert a bunch of unstated assumption about the fluid flow rate, salinity, etc etc.
- ezconnect 6y agoThis is probably one of the reason they pulled it before the 5 years they are planning. The ambient temperature have increased to a level they think it will cause more server failure.
- megablast 6y agoYou can get anti fouling that lasts for 10 years.
- javiramos 6y agoMaybe the vessels could be built with a cleanout mechanism that periodically activates and brushes the outside free of algae?
- znpy 6y agoInterestingly in the original article it said that the datacenter was meant to stay under water for five years. I wonder why they have pulled it out ahead of time. (source: https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-44368813 https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-44368813 -- see video) edit: just to be clear, my questioning isn't meant to be read in a denigratory way. just wondering. Also thank to Kydlaw for pointing out that it actually said "up to five years".
- noisy_boy 6y agoSome executive probably said "I think it would be good to take stock of the experiment now to reduce time-risk and arrive at a decision point regarding future strategy".
- badRNG 6y agoIt increasingly seems that public businesses seem incapable of making long-term plans, even rather trivial ones, if the cost of ending the experiment results in immediate gains. The driving force is the single most important metric: this quarter's upcoming earnings report. Businesses that tend to place bets on multi-year investments are either privately held (e.g. SpaceX) or are participating in specific public/private partnerships. While I do think we are seeing the limits of what a publicly-traded company can actually realize, there are of course counterexamples: Google always seems to have multiple irons in the fire, and there are many other examples in the comments on this discussion of corporate research labs: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24200764 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24200764
- xwdv 6y agoYou get diminishing returns holding it down there for 5 years for no reason. If not much has happened after 2 years we're good to go. We need to get into the future as fast as possible.
- badRNG 6y agoThe difference between 2 years and 5 is quite significant for server runtime above water. This argument of diminishing returns would hold better for placing it 1 year rather than 2, 9 months rather than 12, etc. If the concern is that you'd see significant failure after 5 (which is likely) which could undercut your future plans, I could understand cutting the plan short.
- spamizbad 6y agoVery interesting to see a lower failure rate. Is it simply a function of possibly better thermals than your average datacenter? Less EMR?
- jacquesm 6y agoImpossible to touch it. Better (oxygen poor) environment for circuitry.
- gerbal 6y agoThe container was filed with Nitrogen, so no pesky Oxygen corroding everything.
- mleonhard 6y agoOther explanations: - Technicians were extra careful (slow) when installing the equipment. - The datacenter pod used no recycled parts. Traditional datacenters are full of recycled marginal-quality parts. Maintenance teams balance the cost of buying new parts, the cost of testing used parts, and the labor & downtime costs from recycled parts failing. Extreme reliability is already achievable but not economical. One reason why Google Search beats Bing is that Google's infrastructure software is more tolerant of flaky hardware, so Google can spend less money on hardware maintenance, reducing the cost per search. Hopefully Microsoft will release a report and tell us the source of the underwater datacenter pod's low failure rate.
- rplnt 6y agoBesides reasons mentioned in the article (no oxygen, no humans to bump into stuff), I wonder if radiation could play a role. Cosmic rays, maybe just less radio sources around (tons of other servers).
- elihu 6y agoFrom the article: >The team is speculating that the greater reliability may be connected to the fact that there were no humans on board, and that nitrogen rather than oxygen was pumped into the capsule. > >"We think it has to do with this nitrogen atmosphere that reduces corrosion and is cool, and people not banging things around," Mr Cutler says. Better cooling and isolation from all kinds of radiation seem like they'd also be beneficial.
- mothsonasloth 6y agoI must ask, apart from the renewable energy factor, why do it in Orkney? There are many islands and archipelagos in Scotland, the Hebrides which are closer to the mainland but still out of the way of fishing. Many of them are going to be setup with tidal and wind generators. Would be interesting to see how it was tethered to the shore with networking and power. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2011/mar/17/10megawatt-tidal-power-station-approved-hebrides https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2011/mar/17/10megawa...
- jacquesm 6y agoIt's a place where a lot of research around this theme is conducted.
- alex_duf 6y agoI've heard about Orkney quite a lot, I think it must simply be an innovation hub. That I can think off the top of my head: - Orbital marine, making tidal turbine https://twitter.com/Orbitalmarine https://twitter.com/Orbitalmarine - Their grid https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FXe1hBvlylw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FXe1hBvlylw - Their Hydrogen facilities, using extra renewable https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rybpaqhg5Qg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rybpaqhg5Qg
- arethuza 6y agoIt's apparently powered by energy from the European Marine Energy Centre: http://www.emec.org.uk/ http://www.emec.org.uk/ I suspect there is simply more infrastructure for this kind of thing in Orkney that the other islands.
- ashtonkem 6y agoDepending on the exact shape, sometimes dropping giant bits of steel in the ocean can be very good for shipping; we purposefully sink ships that are EOL for this exact purpose fairly often.
- djsavvy 6y agoThat's the first I've heard of something like this. What's the purpose of dropping specifically-shaped steel into the ocean?
- jacquesm 6y agoWhy heat the oceans indirectly when you can just place the heatsource directly in them? Much less chance of losing precious ergs. Seriously though, what is the direct ecological impact of doing this at scale, would the local increase in temperature have an immediate effect on the life around it? If so how much of an impact? What about the effect on surface life and life in intermediary layers of the water? After all, a body this size radiating 10's of KW of heat would cause substantial convection. At data-centre scale could it conceivably shut-down ocean currents or re-route them?
- slaymaker1907 6y agoFrom what I remember, the impact was pretty minimal. Water has a huge capacity for heat so the temperature was elevated only when very close to the data center.
- reaperducer 6y agothe impact was pretty minimal We used to say that about plastics in the ocean. And landfills. And light pollution. And noise pollution. And space junk. And on and on and on. Heck, not that many decades ago there were responsible people who thought that air pollution was no big deal because there's plenty of air, and it's just fine if California allows rich car collectors to keep buying leaded gasoline long after other states outlawed it. The impact is "minimal."
- golergka 6y agoThis is a non-argument, because it can be used on literally anything, up to lighting one match.
- closeparen 6y agoThe impact of cooling a building on the surface is definitely higher.
- tbabb 6y agoThis reads like you have not done any calculation to determine whether the entire ocean can be heated by any plausible number of datacenters or not.
- kzrdude 6y agoIn the final product, you could build the data center underwater in-place, and have the servers partially accessible - they only need to be connected to the structure in one end, and can be surrounded by water on all other sides. (Visual idea - the data center parts are like fingers on the main structure).
- jacquesm 6y agoAny seal in that construct would be a single-point-of-failure for the whole, not just one fraction.
- datameta 6y agoI would imagine bulkheads can mitigate some unforeseen leak. They can also be built in relatively shallow water without a substantial amount of water pressure.
- jerrysievert 6y agoand if there are any salmon in the area, any sea lion could also be quite dangerous to the whole.
- sradman 6y ago> Microsoft’s Project Natick team deployed the Northern Isles datacenter 117 feet deep to the seafloor in June 2018. For the next two years, team members tested and monitored the performance of the datacenter’s servers. [1] [1] https://natick.research.microsoft.com/ https://natick.research.microsoft.com/
- akhilcacharya 6y agoWas the load in the data center synthetic, or did it handle production traffic? Curious to see how they split it out. I doubt there's a "Orkney-Underwater" region.
- MiroF 6y agoAlmost certainly synthetic
- miyuru 6y agoThe official site has the info you are looking for. "Natick was used to perform COVID-19 research for Folding at Home and World Community Grid." Also the data center designation for it was "Northern Isles" (SSDC-002). https://natick.research.microsoft.com/ https://natick.research.microsoft.com/
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- angry_octet 6y agoAnother example of the journalistic malpractice of not linking to the original articles or data. https://natick.research.microsoft.com/ https://natick.research.microsoft.com/ https://news.microsoft.com/innovation-stories/project-natick-underwater-datacenter/ https://news.microsoft.com/innovation-stories/project-natick... One of the facts left unmentioned is that this was built and operated by Naval, the French state-owned submarine and shipbuilding corporation.
- Kydlaw 6y agoI don't get your point? Why is it that relevant to you?
- zymhan 6y agoBreaking news: Experts on underwater vessel construction asked to construct underwater vessel.
- kevincox 6y ago1. Linking to your sources is a good practice. 2. Their article adds little if any insight over the original article. I would often prefer to see the source and read it instead/additionally.
- s_dev 6y agoIt rewards originality over the long term rather than the fastest copy and paster. Sort of like how we try link to the original YouTube video.
- bredren 6y agoUnderstanding what is OC is an increasingly important point for digital content makers, from memes to ideas for explainer videos. I think with actual articles written by presumed journalists, linking to source data is what establishes the credibility of the author’s writing and suggests they have read and understand the content. Not linking to it doesn’t mean the author doesn’t understand it, but it may mean their work does nothing more than regurgitate (adds nothing of value apart from increased distribution)
- benryon 6y agoOriginal Microsoft story: https://news.microsoft.com/innovation-stories/project-natick-underwater-datacenter/ https://news.microsoft.com/innovation-stories/project-natick...
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- kevin_thibedeau 6y agoThese should be built into the outflow of hydro stations to counteract the unnatural cooling of the downstream river water.
- dathanb82 6y agoHow do hydroelectric plants unnaturally cool water going through them?
- isbjorn16 6y agoMy reasoning would be that hydroelectric plants dam up the water and the water at the lower levels of the reservoir is that which spins the turbines (and is released). I would imagine the "original" depth of the water being discharged has a non-trivial impact on downstream river temperatures - though I lack any and all qualifications necessary to say this with any degree of certainty.
- dathanb82 6y agoHuh. I couldn’t find anything about it one way or the other.
- isbjorn16 6y agoAnecdotally, I know the water outflow from Lake Raystown in Pennsylvania (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raystown_Lake https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raystown_Lake) is SIGNIFICANTLY colder than the lake surface is. I spent a week in the summer there one year and we spent a lot of time boating/swimming in the lake as well as tubing down the river and the days we spent tubing were much warmer air temperature but much colder water temperature. Edit: I also couldn't find any hard numbers!
- ramon 6y agoI don't like the idea since raising water temperatures affects life in the ocean like coral reefs.
- AlanSE 6y agoThis has been covered again and again in other comments. Thermal power plants dump heat into oceans today. The data center is much more efficient than a counterpart on land. Ocean life and coral reefs are in danger due to temperature rise as a part of climate change. Energy efficiency helps reduce that temperature rise.
- ramon 6y agoNo, actually there has been already many studies that there's no turning back on climate change. Even going all electric energy it's not going to do much for climate change, there's no turning back on this aspect at all.
- scrollaway 6y agoIt's not a binary switch.
- buzzerbetrayed 6y agoAfter reading GP's comment multiple times, I do not see any place where he mentioned turning back climate change. So whether or not your comment is true, it doesn't seem to contradict anything GP said. If we wanted to accelerate climate change, we could obviously do so (as proven in the last century). Meaning we have an impact on the acceleration of climate change. Meaning we can make decisions to make that acceleration slower, rather than faster.
- ramon 6y agohttps://climate.nasa.gov/ https://climate.nasa.gov/
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- jeffrallen 6y agoRight, just fine until there's a massive data leak and a slick of SSNs is spreading towards the shore, and then what will the Greens say?
- justinclift 6y agoHmmm, how does one go about "buying" pieces of underwater real estate just off the coastline, in order to set up an underwater data center there? Wonder if it's a "speak to the local council" thing, or more a "speak to the local (?) maritime body"?
- slrainka 6y agoIf an underwater Datacenter is established in International waters, do any of the data and privacy laws apply?
- jarito 6y agoYes. Many of the privacy and data protections are not based on where the data is stored, but rather where the people who provided that data reside. For example, GDPR (an EU regulation) applies to US companies with data in the US, but only if the data they are storing belongs to EU customers.
- m1n1 6y agoIsn't digging easier than dealing with the ocean?
- scientific_ass 6y agoMicrosoft patented the way to power these data centers using tidal energy in ocean itself. They patented in 2017. http://www.whatafuture.com/microsoft-underwater-data-centers/ http://www.whatafuture.com/microsoft-underwater-data-centers...
- lscotte 6y ago"All of Orkney's electricity comes from wind and solar power"
- ehsankia 6y agoIf they patented it in 2017, I'm guessing it probably didn't make it in to this one, but the assumption is that the next version may have that technology.
- HenryBemis 6y agoThat's a good enough reason to pull it out, replace/upgrade the equip, and drop it back in with the new setup (new sources of energy), and if they get the whole thing to transmit wireless-ly with a 1% failures per 2 years (8 out of the 855 servers) then it's a truly set-and-forget thing. And they can be bringing them up every 2-5-10 years to replace/upgrade the HW and drop it back in.
- manderley 6y agoIf that was the reason, we'd know about it from the PR release. This must have been a failure.
- donkeyhot 6y agoIt’s amazing how quickly one gets downvoted for criticizing M$. But the point was legit. Whenever M$ does something it thinks is good you would hear about that. Remember how WSL was touted as a perfect solution for all your Linux needs? And then WSL2 was touted even louder? They had to forgo WSL and start again with a completely different approach because WSL never really worked well. How many bad things have you heard about WSL? None?
- 24gttghh 6y ago5 years planned with no maintenance (e.g. no storage disk failures to replace). I wonder how many spare drives were slapped in that tube to make that feasible?
- maxander 6y agoI would bet they just used SSDs and made sure that the workload they were giving these servers wouldn’t tend to hit the rewrite limit over that time period. (Even then, I’d bet the expected writes-per-time was the source of the “five year” figure.)
- ryanmarsh 6y agoI wonder what the engineering tradeoffs are for building sealed/unserviceable capsules vs. pumping cold seawater a few hundred meters to an on-shore DC? It seems you're just replacing the air/refrigerant heat exchanger for an air/water heat exchanger. Also, an onshore facility could be run in 100% nitrogen as well without the difficulty of managing an artificial reef connected to fiber and power.
- wiredone 6y ago"We are hopeful that we can look at our findings and say maybe we don't need to have quite as much infrastructure focused on power and reliability." I was left wondering whether they were referring to the project, or just Azure Availability in general. /s
- pbhjpbhj 6y agoPerhaps they can be paired with seaweed farms to improve growth rate; feed the seaweed to cattle to reduce methane.
- rozab 6y ago>The team is speculating that the greater reliability may be connected to the fact that there were no humans on board, and that nitrogen rather than oxygen was pumped into the capsule. So, nothing to do with it being underwater?
- sandworm101 6y agoNobody talking about the potential military applications of a hardened processing infrastructure underwater? Once upon a time Russia toyed with the idea of putting ICBM silos at the bottom of lakes. Say you wanted to run a network of hydrophones on the seafloor. You might want to do the data processing in-situ rather than transmit everything back to shore. If I were microsoft I might be interested in those potential contracts.
- sangnoir 6y ago> Once upon a time Russia toyed with the idea of putting ICBM silos at the bottom of lakes Was this before or after nuclear submarines were a thing? I think maintenance is much easier with a submersible than something affixed to a lakebed.
- sandworm101 6y agoDuring SSBN development. The test rigs for submarine missile are essentially floating barges that are sunk beneath the water for testing. So someone though, why not just have the barge sit on the bottom until needed? It can then float to the surface to launch. That is cheaper than building a concrete silo.
- mojomark 6y agoAfter seeing Natick a few years ago, I pitched this very idea to DARPA TTO in person. I also spoke to the MS Natick folks about improving their approach a bit. Neither wanted to persue. Maybe someone is already doing it. Whatever the case, I'm still a proponent and advocate for the concept whenever I get the chance.
- cmarschner 6y agoI wonder how you would deal with theft and espionage for an underwater data center. The fact that no humans are around could be detrimental.
- rhodo 6y agoit wouldn't be too hard I don't think. It's a sealed tube so any attempts to get in could be detected with accelerometers or microphones.
- swagasaurus-rex 6y agoMaybe easier to target the wires
- DenisM 6y agoAttack sharks should easily solve the problem. In fact I heard that Steve Balmer himself was seen under the water, frolicking among his peers.
- jandrese 6y agoIt's hard to imagine anybody getting in there while it's underwater without nation-state level resources. We're talking about a sub with a huge moon pool that you park on top of it, or a specialized cover that fits over the hatch or something. You also have to deal with the pure nitrogen atmosphere inside of the data center. All in all it seems a lot harder than bribing the guards at a regular data center to look the other way while you mess around with some servers.
- StillBored 6y agoIn none of the articles do I see the power consumption of the pod.. But it looks packed with a lot of servers, and the surface area is quite minimal given there don't appear to be any cooling fins/etc. So, that many servers are definitely many KW of power, and its all being conducted away via what appears to be a fairly minimal surface area. So the problem probably isn't the exterior so much as the interior which appears to mostly be a air->paint interface. So, whats the cooling mechanism here, or are the servers that low power?
- quickthrowman 6y agoI was wondering the same thing, since it’s submerged I’m assuming they use seawater running through chillers to cool down the servers?
- maxerickson 6y agoThere's probably an internal heat exchanger that they pump seawater through. This article says they pump seawater through heat exchangers on each rack (and presumably shows the piping): 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-...
- msandford 6y agoSeems kind of strange to put the whole thing underwater if they're going to pump seawater through internal heat exchangers. At that point there's not a lot of difference between putting the "submarine" underwater and leaving it out of -- but near to -- the water and pumping seawater through the same exchangers. With the added benefit of people being able to access things if something goes wrong.
- maxerickson 6y agoTheir public statements so far indicate that, on the prototype, essentially nothing went wrong in a couple of years (a small number of board failures). On the seafloor, they get constant low temperature water with ~0 external pipe and no head to pump against, so it might not obviously be better to have access.
- aaron695 6y agoFor anyone with a brain this is a dumb idea. And of course we get an unquestioning BBC article. If you dump it in landfill or a random corn field this still holds "We think it has to do with this nitrogen atmosphere that reduces corrosion and is cool, and people not banging things around" But it was underwater and that made it magical! Which I honestly think it did. It's still a garbage practical idea though.
- rk1987 6y agoWonder if the data center was used for real world traffic?
- geophertz 6y agoThe thing is that if putting data centers underwater solves the cooling problem, all the heat produced is wasted, so it this really a good solution?
- FartyMcFarter 6y agoI don't know if it's the best solution, but it would seem to beat the "use A/C to cool it" solution.
- crazygringo 6y agoHeat is awfully hard to transfer in the first place, especially when it's not even that hot. It's handy if you can put your data center underneath a swimming pool, for example. But I'm not aware of any large-scale heat recovery projects from data centers. Data centers generally spend extra energy to remove the heat... But honestly who cares if your power comes from renewables in the first place -- solar and wind? It doesn't seem right to even frame it as "wasting" heat in the first place, anymore than the sun's heat was being "wasted" warming up the ocean in the first place.
- Dahoon 6y agoThere are towns in Denmark getting heat from Google and Facebook datacenters so I don't see why it shouldn't work elsewhere. The way MS does it here the heat is 100% waste and should be taxed like other waste. Not to mention what about the noise? The sea is already noise polluted. Here's a source (in Danish). Wind energy in -> 25 MW/h of heat out (to heat up 12.000 houses): https://www.computerworld.dk/art/252732/facebook-vores-data-center-i-odense-udvinder-varme-paa-et-niveau-som-man-endnu-ikke-har-naaet-noget-andet-sted-i-verden https://www.computerworld.dk/art/252732/facebook-vores-data-...
- nomel 6y agoIf the power is generated from waves, wouldn't the energy would have gone to waste at the shoreline/breaker anyways?
- 6y ago
- luxurycommunism 6y agoThere is little to no doubt that the big data centers of the 22nd century will be in space. The less oxygen, the lower the failure rate. I am curious how many experiments have been done with running computers around different elements. I know the cooling scene is obsessessed with near zero kelvin CPU performance and obviously NASA has to run and test if their tech works in zero gravity vacuum. >He believes organisations facing a natural disaster or a terrorist attack might find it attractive: "You could effectively move something to a more secure location without having all the huge infrastructure costs of constructing a building. It's flexible and cost effective." Also like this implication. It's obvious that the DoD would be highly interested in such a thing.
- gregd 6y agoDoes anyone know what the environmental ramifications are of sinking presumably noisy and hot tubes into the ocean? I've been in server rooms and they aren't exactly quiet. The picture of the racks look to me like standard 1U servers.
- chmod775 6y agoWell, marine life is not going to give a damn about warm tubes. There's plenty of natural heat sources in the ocean way more extreme than that. As for the noise, that can have a negative impact, but it's going to be nothing compared to the noise ships are making: https://www.npr.org/2020/07/20/891854646/whales-get-a-break-as-pandemic-creates-quieter-oceans https://www.npr.org/2020/07/20/891854646/whales-get-a-break-... Whether it's high-pitched or low-pitched noise also makes a huge difference underwater.
- nonesuchluck 6y agoThey sunk it half a mile offshore and 117 feet deep. Hardly the abyssal zone. Other than hydrothermal vents, what natural heat sources are you thinking of? (and yes, it's a damn shame the oceans are so noisy due to ships and sonar...and you're prob right about heat not being harmful, I'm just curious what you're referring to)
- chmod775 6y ago> Other than hydrothermal vents, what natural heat sources are you thinking of? Mostly the sun, but also warm freshwater rivers (one of the biggest temperature differentials you'll find excluding hydrothermal vents). Areas with a lot of organic material (algae etc.) close to the shore can also get very warm compared to the temperature average. Though I'm not sure about the cause/effect for the latter.
- nothal 6y agoI wonder if the heat and noise of even a tenth of the data centers in the world would be still so harmless.
- 6y ago
- sktrdie 6y agoWhy not put them in... space? Lots of energy (direct sun) and cold temperatures up there. I guess space debris could be an issue.
- thaumasiotes 6y agoAs I understand it, the temperature is cold in space, but it's still difficult to transfer heat from yourself to the environment (because there's nothing in the environment to absorb the energy). You don't want low temperatures for their own sake; you want them to facilitate heat loss.
- thomond 6y agoConnectivity is an important factor for Data Centres needless to say, how would that work in space?
- CydeWeys 6y agoContrary to popular belief, space in the vicinity of Earth's orbit is not cold. Indeed, it's very hot. You get the full unfiltered force of sunlight (hotter than noon on the equator), and you don't have any material available nearby like air or water to convect the heat away. Cooling is actually a huge problem in orbit, way harder than on Earth where you can just use fans.
- malwrar 6y agoBesides the obstacle of it being difficult to cool objects in space (you need atmosphere to do convection cooling, i.e. heatsinks), you need to somehow actually get everything in space. It costs a lot of money to get heavy things into orbit, whereas it costs nothing to sink those same objects in the water which naturally has better thermal conductivity to boot. As another bonus, you can get at it much easier if you need to perform maintenance by e.g. attaching pods to a crane rig and simply raising it.
- tehbeard 6y agoYeah, temperature is a little more complicated than that in space... You're only option of removing heat is radiating it away (no atmosphere/fluid to conduct/convect to). You're also roasting on one half of the orbit, freezing on the other side. If you look at the ISS they have HUGE radiators for what's little more than a small outpost. Solar's only good for half-ish of the orbit, you'll be reliant on batteries for the darkside (more mass, limited lifespan) Not to mention the dV costs of orbit.
- doctor_eval 6y agoReally gives a new meaning to the term “data lake”
- aussieguy1234 6y agoIf this type of data center is built and the location is kept secret, could it be protected in the event of nuclear war or some other catastrophe? So whatever happens, the internet will keep running
- sgarman 6y agoMy first thought was to go after the weakest link, or the cables/connection in this case.
- ngcc_hk 6y agoThe benefits is secure, nitrogen with renewable energy. it could be anywhere not necessarily in the sea. It could be in a data center as well. A temper proof ... And one need to dig it out to check though meant it is not connected. Not very useful. Even a mars based one we want them to communicate. Even low end just control signal.
- 867-5309 6y agothey probably surfaced it to replace the Intel CPUs with NVIDIARM C/GPUs
- WalterBright 6y agoPutting data centers for lower latency needs in the arctic ought to do just fine.
- tyingq 6y ago"The team is speculating that the greater reliability may be connected to the fact that there were no humans on board, and that nitrogen rather than oxygen was pumped into the capsule." That does sound plausible. But I do wonder how much might have been due to extra care. If I were the sysadmin on the project, I probably would have spent extra time on component selection, cable seating, burn-in testing, etc. Lots of pressure for it to do well. Edit: Unrelated, but this picture is funny to me. I don't think there's enough room to slide that server out, so I'm not sure what he's doing. https://ichef.bbci.co.uk/news/800/cpsprodpb/48D6/production/_114364681_1033microsoft_3343.jpg https://ichef.bbci.co.uk/news/800/cpsprodpb/48D6/production/...
- eru 6y agoThey should have probably prepared two tubes like that, and flipped a coin to randomly dunk one in water, and leave the other one up?
- SoylentOrange 6y agoA friend of mine wrote a paper on the effects of cosmic rays on memory errors in data centers a few years ago[1]. He also posited they had effects on hard drive reliability. The first thing I thought of when reading this article is whether the increased shielding from the water reduced the impact of cosmic rays on the hardware. [1]: https://www.cs.toronto.edu/~bianca/papers/ASPLOS2012.pdf https://www.cs.toronto.edu/~bianca/papers/ASPLOS2012.pdf
- maroonmed 6y ago<insert DigitalOcean joke here>
- 29athrowaway 6y agoIt is undeniable that something fishy is going on down there.
- thysultan 6y agoRunning C at zero degree's C in the sea.
- eklavyaa 6y agoThey are only discussing about how they can make it more efficient. As far as I understand one kind of cost cutting they are aiming is energy and money required in "Cooling" systems, ya I read about less failure cases too. But putting a heat generating device under water will have adverse effect on underwater ecosystem surrounding it.
- defnotashton2 6y agoThe same is true of land based operations ha IMG environmental impact, there is a whole lot more sea than land.
- eklavyaa 6y agoare you trying to say we can afford to alter sea because its alot than land ?
- kumarvvr 6y agoCooling underwater does not produce additional carbon. Cooling in normal data centers, produces a lot of carbon (in case they are using solar panels, production of those panels generates short term carbon). I would definitely choose the former over the latter.