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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

#321

Post by naravara »

edhu2017 wrote: post #309
coffeeacc wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Here's the problem for me. These mining operations can be exploited to an extreme. Any scientist or professor with knowledge in protein representations will have an unfair advantage over normal miners. This gap will be even larger than the hashpower gaps we see between ASICs and "normal" miners in bitcoin, litecoin, etc because scientists will have access to not only hardware but also extremely specific domain knowle…

>Any scientist or professor with knowledge in protein representations will have an unfair advantage over normal miners.

I, for one, welcome our new protein folding overlords. May they rule us more justly than the investment bankers they've replaced. :-p

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

#322

Post by naravara »

Raidion wrote: post #266
gwbas1c wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At this point, we know that Bitcoin doesn't scale to handle the volume of transactions needed for a global digital currency. Ultimately, if you own Bitcoin in hopes of the value going up, it will only go up if someone is willing to pay more for it. There's no other utilitarian use of it. This means that Bitcoin is a 0-sum game*, and a tremendous waste of resources. At least with gold mining we end up with a material…

I'm not a huge fan of bitcoin and have never owned more than 200 dollars worth, but that's a super weird argument to make. Of course something only goes up in value if someone is willing to pay more for it, that's true of art, cars, houses, or whatever. You could argue that a house has more utilitarian value, as you could always live there, but that completely ignores the other persons goals. A house isn't going to b…

>I could buy a bitcoin from someone else who has one with local currency, I lower my risk of ruin from currency inflation by paying a price that I deem reasonable

You could just use dollars, euros, or yuan instead. Which is what people currently do in that situation.

Or, be like the mobsters and take payment in goods like olive oil, stolen art, or drugs.

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

#323

Post by DoubleCribble »

If clusters of these tanks are eventually deployed, it could have some surprising effects on local marine life and might be a good way to jumpstart a marine preserve. [0] [0]https://www.abcactionnews.com/news/local-news/clusters-of-ma...

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

#324

Post by naravara »

masklinn wrote: post #53
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.

> 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…

>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.

Seems a shame to let all that heat go to waste. Surely we put that waste heat to use and a distillery or desalinization plant or something.

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

#325

Post by ribosometronome »

naravara wrote: post #320
danappelxx wrote: post #319

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not if you want the currency to replace traditional currencies in the future.

Presumably that wouldn't be a goal for such things. You could just as easily call them "coolness points" and use them as badges of distinction. That alone could motivate participation. God knows it works for Reddit.

https://stats.foldingathome.org/teams

Folding@Home already has team stats with points.

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

#326

Post by ethbro »

gowld wrote: post #311
foobarchu wrote: post #285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And the HFT industry is incentivized to use as little processor time as possible, and thus as little power as possible.

That's not true. They'll take a 400W 10GHz CPU over a 5mW 1 GHz CPU every time, if it generates better financial returns.

Parent was referring to latency optimization, I believe.

But I'd assume most of those folks have ML / other slower models constantly churning away in the background, even if their HFT reactions are highly tuned and simpler.

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

#327

Post by Declanomous »

HankB99 wrote: post #306
overcast wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's just unbelievable. To even survive the Deskstar era blows my mind. Not a single drive?

Up until a couple years ago I could have said the same. I even have a couple deathstars on the shelf that were operational when retired. In the last couple years I've had several HDDs fail starting with a 2TB Seagate (one of the "stars" in the Backblaze stats.) I've had others fail since, mostly multi-TB drives. I had one nearly ten year old 200GB drive begin to report remapped sectors. I've even had an SSD develop a…

My dad managed to kill a 2 year old Samsung SSD; it wouldn't even show up on the bios. Tech support was so incredulous they actually had an Electrical Engineer on their staff call him.

I didn't believe him either. I was like "Dad, SSDs are designed to fail in a way you can recover data. What SATA cable are you using? Is the port dead?"

Turns out it was literally the drive.

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

#328

Post by dlhavema »

semanticist wrote: post #241
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?

The industrial scale cooling used in datacentres can produce weird results, like when it rained inside Facebook's first datacentre: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/06/08/facebook_cloud_vers...

Sounds like tehy didnt know about this building [1]. That happened like 50ish years ago

1: https://roadtrippers.com/stories/boeing-factory

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

#329

Post by madrox »

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…

This has come up a number of times...probably because of the studies[1] over the last year or so. It's convenient to hit bitcoin on this front because it's conceivable to estimate its energy footprint. What I find frustrating is that we look at no other segment of tech this way. We never discuss the energy consumption of video games or the stock market. How can we say if this is very bad if we have nothing to compare it to? It's quite likely there are far worse offenders.

To be clear, I hold no bitcoin. I'm no fan of it, but I find criticism of its energy consumption disingenuous...especially when there are so many more valid criticisms of it to seize on.

[1] https://www.cell.com/joule/fulltext/S2542-4351(18)30177-6 and others

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

#330

Post by wellboy »

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…

Or focus on cryptocurrencies that are much more scalable and decentralized than Bitcoin and don't use Proof of work as a consensus mechanism, such as

1. Skycoin, Web of Trust 2. Iota, Tangle 3. Aeternity and soon alsk Ethereum with PoS/PoW hybrid

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