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Want an energy efficient datacenter? Build it underwater

spectrum.ieee.org

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Re: Want an energy efficient datacenter? Build it underwater

#41

Post by motoboi »

stephengillie wrote: post #31

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…

Space suits have ar-conditioning units so astronauts don't die of overheating. This is how hard is to radiate heat to space.

Re: Want an energy efficient datacenter? Build it underwater

#42

Post by walrus01 »

Florin_Andrei wrote: post #30
jefflombardjr wrote: post #24

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 maintainin…

> 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?

> To metals. Not so much to plastics.

I'm guessing you've never experienced the joys of owning a 30 to 40 ft sized, completely non metal (fiberglass hull) sailboat kept in salt water, with all of the great fun of paying to haul it and have the marine growth scaped off, pressure washed, double or triple coat bottom paint re-applied, etc. Just because it's not metal doesn't mean it doesn't attract the category of what the maritime industry lumps together as "marine fouling".

Re: Want an energy efficient datacenter? Build it underwater

#43

Post by Xylakant »

walrus01 wrote: post #42
Florin_Andrei wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

> To metals. Not so much to plastics. I'm guessing you've never experienced the joys of owning a 30 to 40 ft sized, completely non metal (fiberglass hull) sailboat kept in salt water, with all of the great fun of paying to haul it and have the marine growth scaped off, pressure washed, double or triple coat bottom paint re-applied, etc. Just because it's not metal doesn't mean it doesn't attract the category of what…

Though marine fouling is primarily of concern for fiberglass boats because it massively increases drag which admittedly is less of an issue for a datacenter. It's still an issue for the pods as mentioned in the article, but I'd expect it to be less grave than on a boat.

Re: Want an energy efficient datacenter? Build it underwater

#44

Post by jedberg »

lithos wrote: post #26
jedberg wrote: post #5

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 t…

There was an article posted about one of the Antarctic data centers. And it's a horrible place to put one. Air too dry, too cold, parts being months away, and rubber/cardboard losing the properties that it needs. The shear terror when power goes out which will destroy a server if it's out too long.

Yeah that was one of the many reasons it was a terrible idea. :)

Re: Want an energy efficient datacenter? Build it underwater

#45

Post by jpm_sd »

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"...

Re: Want an energy efficient datacenter? Build it underwater

#47

Post by [deleted] »

walrus01 wrote: post #42
Florin_Andrei wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

> To metals. Not so much to plastics. I'm guessing you've never experienced the joys of owning a 30 to 40 ft sized, completely non metal (fiberglass hull) sailboat kept in salt water, with all of the great fun of paying to haul it and have the marine growth scaped off, pressure washed, double or triple coat bottom paint re-applied, etc. Just because it's not metal doesn't mean it doesn't attract the category of what…

[deleted]

Re: Want an energy efficient datacenter? Build it underwater

#48

Post by SomeStupidPoint »

chatmasta wrote: post #21
kortex wrote: post #9

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.

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!

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.

Re: Want an energy efficient datacenter? Build it underwater

#49

Post by noir_lord »

kortex wrote: post #9

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.

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.

Re: Want an energy efficient datacenter? Build it underwater

#50

Post by baking »

Xylakant wrote: post #43
walrus01 wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> To metals. Not so much to plastics. I'm guessing you've never experienced the joys of owning a 30 to 40 ft sized, completely non metal (fiberglass hull) sailboat kept in salt water, with all of the great fun of paying to haul it and have the marine growth scaped off, pressure washed, double or triple coat bottom paint re-applied, etc. Just because it's not metal doesn't mean it doesn't attract the category of what…

Though marine fouling is primarily of concern for fiberglass boats because it massively increases drag which admittedly is less of an issue for a datacenter. It's still an issue for the pods as mentioned in the article, but I'd expect it to be less grave than on a boat.

Marine fouling of the heat exchangers is probably the biggest technical hurdle.
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