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

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

#361

Post by perl4ever »

deegles wrote: post #280
rtkwe wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Physical gold still needs to be mined, smelted, transported, and guarded. When you buy it and move it around energy is spent too. So if you really want an apples-to-apples comparison you'd have to count the energy needed to mine each oz. of gold.

The most succinct critique of Bitcoin is, in my opinion, that it's rediscovering the drawbacks of a 100% gold standard vs paper money. It's just like a pure abstraction of the waste of digging stuff out of the ground just so we can count things. It's inexpressibly sophomoric.

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

#362

Post by perl4ever »

rtkwe wrote: post #307
deegles wrote: post #303

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The large majority of Bitcoin isn't actually moved every block either. And those systems you describe to reassign rights to gold also use energy. As block rewards fall, profit will come from transaction fees only, and only the most efficient miners (best equipment or energy access) will remain. Sure, Bitcoin uses more energy now than a database sitting on a server, but it's solving a different problem.

It is solving a different problem but that doesn't change the fact that the whole network's mining work is required to make it work. There are some energy costs to tracking the rights of stored gold but they're vanishingly small compared to BTC. We're getting sucked down into the weeds here and losing sight of the original point which is BTC as designed requires the use of massive amount of energy to validate and sec…

I think gold is flawed in essentially the same way as BTC. Mining BTC is called mining because it's a neat abstraction of the old fashioned process. The reason fiat currency took over historically is because there's a tremendous benefit to eliminating the dead weight of mining if you can evolve a more subtle way of limiting supply.

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

#363

Post by antpls »

pjc50 wrote: post #122
wpdev_63 wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a big reason. The cost of leasing out space is definitely more expensive than the cost of cooling these datacenters. Why spend several million dollars in leasing space when you can drop a datacenter capsule off the coast with free cooling? Who cares about the cost of hardware.

The cost of connecting the thing via submarine cable to a suitable land point is likely to be a lot higher than you think.

Do you have a source to back this statement?

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

#364

Post by Radim »

masklinn wrote: post #172
Radim wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Local pockets of increased heat have not been observed to nurture life? Thermals mentioned by OP are just one obvious example. I agree making use of subtle energy gradients is not trivial, but life is pretty good at it nevertheless. Even in conditions you wouldn't expect it. And no surprise — it had billions of years to evolve that way. If you wanted to be daring, you could even say that's what life is for.

> Local pockets of increased heat have not been observed to nurture life? That's absolutely not what the comment you're replying to says. What it says is: > If this were the case, the biological density of the highest-temperature locations in the ocean should be significantly higher than average. > Thermals mentioned by OP are just one obvious example. Thermals are not just heat, and by and large the heat is not a so…

Listen, my claim is simple: submerged data centres will give rise to richer, more complex ecosystems around them (due to the extra energy, heat convection, increased entropy etc), in a surprisingly short timeframe. Because that's what life's good at.

You disagree, giving reasons I find irrelevant here (a data centre won't make a dent in the average ocean temperature, and certainly won't make it "the highest-temperature location in the ocean"), but I respect that. The good news is that the impact will be easy to evaluate once deployed.

In fact, testing the data centre's impact on the surrounding ecosystem will surely be a mandatory component of any such project, so we'll get to see the hard data. Let evidence be the judge of the "absolutely nots".

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

#365

Post by grkvlt »

naravara wrote: post #324
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…

>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 som…

To let all that radioactive heat go to waste? Although maybe that's just the primary coolant circuit - is the water they use from rivers/the ocean made radioactive, or just heated?

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

#366

Post by HankB99 »

Declanomous wrote: post #327
HankB99 wrote: post #306

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I recall hearing of similar failures early on. I don't recall the brand. Apparently the controller goes bad and it just stops responding to SATA commands.

Intel had a strategy that caused them to go into read only mode once they reached their rated lifetime write capacity. All data remained available until they were power cycled whereupon they would intentionally brick themselves.

In my case it is was a Crucial M4. It still tries to operate but will fail the long SMART self test.

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

#367

Post by crb002 »

djtriptych wrote: post #343
sathackr wrote: post #292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Spinning hard drives have a decent gryoscopic effect. Hold one while it's powered up and try rotating it in a manner that would change the plane of the platters and you will feel the resistance. Each time you do that, it puts a slight load on the spindle bearings. Do it repeatedly on a varying 5-30 second cycle and you'll simulate what a harddrive on a boat or barge in the open water would experience. I can imagine t…

Right but who is deciding to use spinning hard drives instead of SSDs in an underwater data center?

Cooling fan spindles are subject to the same forces; and they had a large array of cooling fans.

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

#368

Post by williamdclt »

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...

The only hard drive I've broken was because a let a pretty powerful magnet fall on the computer, right on the spot the HDD is. Never play with magnets next to your computer.

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

#369

Post by skjerns »

dorfsmay wrote: post #269

I wish somebody worked on using that unwanted heat, like they do in swimming pool / ice rink combos, rather than finding ways to just disperse it faster in the environment.

my local swimming pool is heated by waste-heat of a nearby powerplant

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

#370

Post by rtkwe »

michaelscott wrote: post #336
rtkwe wrote: post #300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You're assuming gold / physicalvaluestores can be spent without shipping cost and exchange fees and that the volume traded reaches 0 in your comparison. Is the volume of any valuestore ever 0? That's why gold isn't a currency there are definite transaction costs but the whole of the costs of transporting gold spent isn't required for my gold to be spent. With BTC the whole network supports all transactions and all…

> That's why gold isn't a currency there are definite transaction costs but the whole of the costs of transporting gold spent isn't required for my gold to be spent. Whole costs for transporting gold are definitely required to be spent... the gold must be transported from one owner's location to another, unless the escrow between the two parties is the same or you're actually trading ETFs. > With BTC the whole networ…

> That's why gold isn't a currency there are definite transaction costs but the whole of the costs of transporting gold spent isn't required for my gold to be spent.

What I'm trying to say here is that my transaction doesn't depend on the energy required to transport all the gold traded.

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