131–140 of 397 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Time for outerspace data centers with ultrafast space elevator strato-cable connections.
Counterintuitively, cooling is really difficult in outer space. It's cold, but there's no air or water circulating to remove the waste heat by convection. Instead you have to rely on radiating the heat away, which is much less efficient.
> Prof Ian Bitterlin, a data centre consultant for nearly 30 years, is sceptical about the environmental impact of going underwater. > "You just end up with a warmer sea and bigger fish," he says. > And 90% of Europe's data centres are in big cities such as London and Madrid because that is where they are needed. > Microsoft's Ben Cutler insists the warming effect will be minimal - "the water just metres downstream w…
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…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Time for outerspace data centers with ultrafast space elevator strato-cable connections.
Counterintuitively, cooling is really difficult in outer space. It's cold, but there's no air or water circulating to remove the waste heat by convection. Instead you have to rely on radiating the heat away, which is much less efficient.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Even if I'm off by a few orders of magnitude I'm not saying there is a problem with your calculations, but if you were just one order of magnitude off, then after 10 years that would be 1°C, which is a colossal amount. The main problem with global warming, as I understand it, is that 1 or 2 degrees change to the atmosphere would melt a huge amount of polar ice. I imagine that if the sea were increase in temperature…
> I'm not saying there is a problem with your calculations, but if you were just one order of magnitude off, then after 10 years that would be 1°C, which is a colossal amount. That is assuming that all the electricity produced on Earth is used to heat the oceans , which is not realistic. Oceanic datacenters are not likely to ever amount to more than a few percent (and even that is unlikely) of the total human electri…
Oops, I misread your comment, sorry. I thought you were talking about all electricity used in data centres worldwide.
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 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…
$ units -t '24816400 GWh / (1347000000 km^3) / (1 kg/dm^3) / (4200 J/kg/K)'
1.5908368e-05 KEarlier quoted context omitted.
I have. Including things like the heads falling off and spinning around, grinding everything to junk.
That sickening click sound that a disk drive makes when it's on the verge of failure is ingrained in my head. I tried putting one of those in the freezer once, and maybe it was a folk remedy, but it worked enough to boot and get my data off!
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I have. Including things like the heads falling off and spinning around, grinding everything to junk.
That sickening click sound that a disk drive makes when it's on the verge of failure is ingrained in my head. I tried putting one of those in the freezer once, and maybe it was a folk remedy, but it worked enough to boot and get my data off!
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If the heat becomes enough, couldn’t we recycle it?
No, because you can not convert heat alone into energy. You need a heat difference (something hot and something cold). And the efficiency of the conversion depends on the temperature difference.
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.
If your data center isn't registered and flying a flag, won't it be salvage and belong to whoever recovers it?
> 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...