Earlier quoted context omitted.
Coupling an undersea datacenter with an offshore windfarm just sounds all-around clever.
Until a hurricane destroys it.
Are other structures safer against hurricanes?
Microsoft has sunk a data centre in the sea to investigate energy efficiency
351–360 of 397 posts
Re: Microsoft has sunk a data centre in the sea to investigate energy efficiency
#352Re: Microsoft has sunk a data centre in the sea to investigate energy efficiency
#353Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
According to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_electrici... , total electricity production is about 24816400 GWh/year (~25 PWh/year, so you were 3 orders of magnitude off). $ units -t '24816400 GWh / (1347000000 km^3) / (1 kg/dm^3) / (4200 J/kg/K)' 1.5908368e-05 K
And if there's 7.62 gigapersons on earth, that's about 3.2MWh/year per person or 271 kWh/month per person.
Since that's the same order of magnitude as, say, a US household, that does seem credible.
Re: Microsoft has sunk a data centre in the sea to investigate energy efficiency
#354Earlier 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…
I'm trying to see how the efficiency is gained and I just don't really see it. I guess you don't need to pump water for water cooling so you save the pumping energy, or maybe lower fan speeds or something, but it really seems like it would be a minimal amount. What it does seem like is a cheap way to build a water cooling system that doesn't really need to be maintained. It seems like switching to arm would be a much…
> It seems like switching to arm would be a much bigger efficiency gain
That's a false dichotomy. More energy-efficient CPUs don't preclude efficiencies from cooling.
I suppose the case could be made that CPUs account for the vast majority of datacenter cooling needs and that ARM efficiencies would eliminate so much of that need that any efficiences in the cooling itself would not be worth anywhere near this kind of cost. I'd expect some pretty extraordinary evidence backing up that argument, since those would be pretty extraordinary claims.
Re: Microsoft has sunk a data centre in the sea to investigate energy efficiency
#355Earlier quoted context omitted.
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!
That must be one of the silliest hacks I've ever heard, right up there with oven-baking electronics to fix loose solder joints. I love it!
There was a type of Seagate drive long ago (I believe mine was a 2GB) that would stop working, apparently because the spindle got stuck. But if you shook it in a rotational manner, it would unstick! The first time I sent it for warranty service and of course they deleted all my data. But the next time it happened I learned about the trick.
Re: Microsoft has sunk a data centre in the sea to investigate energy efficiency
#356At 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…
You say "assuming all of it becomes waste heat", but doesn't all of the energy consumed necessarily become waste heat no matter what?
Re: Microsoft has sunk a data centre in the sea to investigate energy efficiency
#357Earlier 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.
I have the impression "cold" is kind of ambiguous in space, because while there are very few particles, the ones that are there are moving quickly, which could be seen as a high temperature.
Re: Microsoft has sunk a data centre in the sea to investigate energy efficiency
#358Earlier quoted context omitted.
The assumption is that there is no real benefit to the energy expenditure Bitcoin demands. This isn't true for video games (entertainment is generally considered to be worth a decent amount of resources for the psychological benefits it brings) or the stock market (it's basically the heart of our economy). If you don't share these assumptions, you'll come to a different conclusion. But I don't think it's hypocrisy.
Exactly, discussing this requires the assumption that bitcoin has little value, instead of directly discussing its value. It may not be hypocrisy, but it's certainly fallacious. It only reinforces existing beliefs in the merit/demerit of bitcoin.
I cannot understand why people (certainly not just you) are so relentlessly obtuse about the destructive effect of Bitcoin mining and how it differs from other currencies.
Say I trade a barrel of oil for $65. That barrel of oil is going to get burnt, (because otherwise it wouldn't have value to the recipient) but the process of burning it can produce something useful, like transportation.
If I burn a barrel of oil to create electricity to mine 0.0084 bitcoin (about $65), I've "traded" the same amount of oil for the same currency value, but I've used the energy up by hashing. Nothing is left over to transport people or make plastic or whatever.
There is a clear difference between a currency where it costs maybe 10 cents to create a token that circulates at $100, and one where it costs $100 which nobody gains to circulate at $100. It doesn't balance out - it is an unambiguous terrible waste. And as I think of it, isn't it really just the same waste as a 100% gold standard?
Re: Microsoft has sunk a data centre in the sea to investigate energy efficiency
#359Earlier quoted context omitted.
I would think far less. HFT isn’t intentionally computationally expensive.
And the HFT industry is incentivized to use as little processor time as possible, and thus as little power as possible.
My impression is that to the extent that HFT is about relative speed, competition can't reduce power usage.
Re: Microsoft has sunk a data centre in the sea to investigate energy efficiency
#360Earlier 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…
Issuing a $100 bill only requires about 10 cents of overhead.
Mining $100 in bitcoin requires $100 of overhead because it's inherent to the hashing mechanism.
This is a big difference.