Microsoft has sunk a data centre in the sea to investigate energy efficiency

Post by jusssi » Wed, Jun 06, 2018, 12:15 PM UTC

adzicg wrote: post #115

This opens quite an interesting perspective for 'off-shore' hosting, literally. I remember from a previous gig a while ago that renting servers in Saskatchewan or something similar provided companies with a favourable legislation as well as cheaper server cooling. If you plunge a data centre into the middle of the sea somewhere in international waters, does it really fall under any legislation?

Post by arethuza » Wed, Jun 06, 2018, 12:16 PM UTC

pjc50 wrote: post #114

choonway wrote: post #74

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.

However, Orkney isn't in the middle of anywhere, it's some distance even from Telehouse London.

Post by Radim » Wed, Jun 06, 2018, 12:20 PM UTC

adwn wrote: post #150

Radim wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> nature will adapt just fine to both heat and cold Not with the same ease! That's the point — it is a one-way street. "Having easy access to energy" or "not having easy access to energy" are NOT equivalent states for flourishment. They're not equally "just fine". The rest seems like you're grinding some anthropomorphic axe unrelated to my post, so I'll abstain.

> "Having easy access to energy" Life needs an energy gradient . In this case, direct access to colder water. No organism (or machine) can use the heat energy of its environment if it has no access to a colder medium. Edit: I just saw that Retric explained it better ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17245948 ).

Post by theandrewbailey » Wed, Jun 06, 2018, 12:32 PM UTC

mpweiher wrote: post #23

cm2187 wrote: post #12

> 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...

Post by FLUX-YOU » Wed, Jun 06, 2018, 12:39 PM UTC

sushid wrote: post #43

alexghr wrote: post #36

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.

Well you're making it sound as if the data centers being cooled somehow wouldn't happen otherwise. Seeing as how the alternative is to cool using A/C, surely it's the case of causing less harm than the alternative? Of course you could argue that the lower cost of this cooling method will create a larger demand for cheaper servers/data storage, which increases net harm, for which I have no answer.