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.
If the heat becomes enough, couldn’t we recycle it?
Microsoft has sunk a data centre in the sea to investigate energy efficiency
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Re: Microsoft has sunk a data centre in the sea to investigate energy efficiency
#102Imagine 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.
Powering 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.
Re: Microsoft has sunk a data centre in the sea to investigate energy efficiency
#103I 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.
Even 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.
This 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.
Re: Microsoft has sunk a data centre in the sea to investigate energy efficiency
#104We 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…
Hi 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.
Hi 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”.
Re: Microsoft has sunk a data centre in the sea to investigate energy efficiency
#105 # 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'dRe: Microsoft has sunk a data centre in the sea to investigate energy efficiency
#106At 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.
We're already heating the sea (and everything else) by running the air conditioners to cool the datacentres, and generating the electricity to power the air conditioners that cool the datacentres.
This is more a lot more efficient.
Perhaps there might be a localised effect, but I doubt the effects would be as severe as the carbon emissions saved.
Re: Microsoft has sunk a data centre in the sea to investigate energy efficiency
#107Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I know, the oceans are big, but so is our data. Meh. The biggest data center (ChinaTel's Inner Mongolia Information Park) consumes about 150MWe, assuming all of it becomes waste heat it's basically nothing: a nuclear reactor (each plant has 2~8) releases 2Wt for each We it produces, and they're usually sized between 800 and 1300MWe. Hell, earth averages 160W/m^2 from the sun, oceans cover 360m km^2, so oceans get 1…
In addition, the heat represents extra energy. Warmth and water (and carbon) are the very fabric of life. Nature will adapt to utilize this free energy source before you could say "thank you". My prediction is we'll be amazed at the life forms that develop and explode around such submerged cooling structures.
Jellyfish that will clog the water intakes
Re: Microsoft has sunk a data centre in the sea to investigate energy efficiency
#108> 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 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-20...
I've seen a whole batch of hard drives fail: one-by-one the company's employees' PCs failed over a period of a week or two. They had all been bought together in a single upgrade.
I (on a Mac) was unaffected (and no doubt a little smug).
Re: Microsoft has sunk a data centre in the sea to investigate energy efficiency
#109Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not 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 plunge…
Oh, 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…
I 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.
Re: Microsoft has sunk a data centre in the sea to investigate energy efficiency
#110I 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.
City 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.