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

bbc.com

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

#231

Post by rtkwe »

gnode wrote: post #225
rtkwe wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Only Bitcoin requires the continuous consumption of energy to continue being a useful asset though.

Bitcoin doesn't intrinsically require that much power. The computation to verify transactions is a tiny fraction of that required to compete for the next block by hashing. The high hash rate is because of the high difficulty, which is itself dependent on the hash rate of the entire network. If the price of bitcoin drops, the incentive to mine decreases, and thus so does the difficulty. This is comparable to gold, as…

But once extracted their energy costs are negligible (especially with gold being stored and the rights traded instead of the physical asset a lot of the time). In the case of BTC you can't really separate out the cost of mining a block from validating the transaction because until it's in a block a transaction doesn't really exist (this will get much better with lightning though). But without the constant burn of mining BTC (even post lightning) will be come useless.

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

#232

Post by okmokmz »

Radim wrote: post #99
masklinn wrote: post #53

Earlier 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.

> 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"

Ocean warming is extremely detrimental to ecosystems across the globe. You can't just simplify it to more heat == more energy == better

>In other non-tropical regions of the world, marine heat waves have been responsible for widespread loss of habitat-forming species, their distribution and the structure of their communities. This has a tremendous economic impact on seafood industries that have to deal with the decline of essential fishery species.

>It is likely that over the past century, the impacts on ecological chains have been more frequent as ocean temperatures have escalated decade after decade. This is the case in Nova Scotia, where kelp forests are literally being wiped-out by water which is much warmer than usual. In this corner of Canada, the ocean is not just a form of recreation, it also means a way of life for many that rely on fisheries and aquaculture as an important part of their economy.[1]

[1]https://www.theweathernetwork.com/news/articles/ocean-heat-w...

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

#233

Post by abritinthebay »

d0lph wrote: post #218
cc-d wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Bitcoin, gold, diamond You're being dishonest if you're pretending these things are identically comparable.

They're all arbitrary stores of value whos intrinsic value is not justified by the market price?

None of them have intrinsic value.

At least gold & diamonds are useful

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

#234

Post by rtkwe »

d0lph wrote: post #223
rtkwe wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Only Bitcoin requires the continuous consumption of energy to continue being a useful asset though.

Right, diamonds just cost human lives.

But that isn't an inherent fact of a diamond. Mining them doesn't require that people lose their lives it's a fact of shitty people. And most diamonds consumers will encounter aren't from that stream.

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

#235

Post by ams6110 »

abritinthebay wrote: post #233
d0lph wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They're all arbitrary stores of value whos intrinsic value is not justified by the market price?

None of them have intrinsic value. At least gold & diamonds are useful

useful + scarce == intrinsic value, no?

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

#236

Post by 0110011 »

simon_acca wrote: post #66
0110011 wrote: post #40

Wondering how long it will be until we have cloud data centers in space... Seems like it could be useful to offer a flexible computing infrastructure to small sats and science missions without requiring ground comms.

Actually getting rid of excess energy is a huge problem in space since it's pretty empty: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/External_Active_Thermal_Cont...

Totally. It's the difficulties of putting lots of computing resources in space (heat, power, serviceability, radiation) that actually makes it attractive for selling compute time. Only one company needs to solve those problems and others can leverage that work for a fee. If it was easy, there wouldn't be a business opportunity.

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

#237

Post by gnode »

justincormack wrote: post #230
gnode wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Naturally scarce stores of value like Bitcoin, gold, diamonds, etc. have always "wasted" resources, whether they be power, human resource, or polluting the environment. On one hand you could regard them as immoral because of this, on the other hand they enable the freedom to store value without trust.

You can't "store value" without trust. Value is not a thing, it is an implicit contract to exchange things over time, and requires trust that everyone will continue to adhere to the contract, ie that debts will be paid.

You're right, I was wrong to say without trust. I think it would have been more apt to say trust in their integrity. Demand can of course change, but your gold won't be physically redefined by other parties.

I think an interesting difference between cryptocurrencies and precious metals, is that to some extent they can be redefined by consensus of the network, or split consensus (e.g. Etherium and Etherium Classic). So I'll concede that they don't even strictly negate the need for trust in their integrity.

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

#238

Post by ams6110 »

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...

Even managing just a few hundred nodes, I see hard drive failures pretty routinely. Servers hammering on storage devices 24x7 are much different from desktop computers. I've never had a hard drive fail on my own desktop machine, though I know people who have.

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

#239

Post by ams6110 »

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?

A trend in energy-efficient data centers is to maintain temperatures and humidity at near the maximum acceptable levels to reduce energy use for cooling and dehumidification.

Data centers used to be like walk-in refrigerators. Now the air is borderline uncomfortably warm and slightly "heavy" with humidity.

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

#240

Post by coffeeacc »

cc-d wrote: post #193

> There has been growing concern that the rapid expansion of the data centre industry could mean an explosion in energy use. But Emma Fryer, who represents the sector at Tech UK, says that fear has been exaggerated. If we're concerned about the technology industry vastly increasing energy consumption, lets look at the entire medium sized country's worth of energy bitcoin is consuming for absolutely useless calculatio…

Task for some more suited than me: turn transactions into protein representations, and every mining operation becomes a folding operation.
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