81–90 of 397 posts
I 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.
> 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?
I had a PC I built and moved to a bungalow near the beach. Within the year it's power supply had rusted. My last PC in a relatively arid environment lasted 4 years. It's probably the "sea" environment that would pose corrosion issues.
What would be its ecological impact?
This can't be a new idea. Or is it that it's only now become possible to do such a thing?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
If my calculation is correct, the total annual electricity production in the world (I used 20 279 PWh) would heat up the oceans (1 347 000 000 km³ of water) by 0,0129°C. It's rather easy to calculate because one calorie is the energy required to heat up one gramme of water by one degree Celsius, the rest is just unit conversions, but I could have messed up anywhere of course. Even if I'm off by a few orders of magnit…
>(I used 20 279 PWh) would heat up the oceans (1 347 000 000 km³ of water) Your calculation is stupid because you dont need to heat up whole ocean, heating up small areas it will be butterfly effect, enough to badly affect bigger areas. Look at this: >As the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere rises due to emissions of fossil fuels, more of the gas is dissolving in the ocean. That is lowering the pH of…
No need to be rude. "There is an issue with your calculation because" would have worked :/
Putting 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.
For example: industrial, unregulated fishing destroys coral reefs every day. They are thousands of years old and won't come back.
At 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.
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 .
[1] We covered this in our blog (https://submer.com/microsoft-testing-undersea-immersion-cool...) [2] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/feb/20/much-wor...
At 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.
Time for outerspace data centers with ultrafast space elevator strato-cable connections.