Nobody talking about the potential military applications of a hardened processing infrastructure underwater? Once upon a time Russia toyed with the idea of putting ICBM silos at the bottom of lakes. Say you wanted to run a network of hydrophones on the seafloor. You might want to do the data processing in-situ rather than transmit everything back to shore. If I were microsoft I might be interested in those potential contracts.
Microsoft's underwater data centre resurfaces after two years
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Re: Microsoft's underwater data centre resurfaces after two years
#212I wonder how you would deal with theft and espionage for an underwater data center. The fact that no humans are around could be detrimental.
Re: Microsoft's underwater data centre resurfaces after two years
#213I wonder how you would deal with theft and espionage for an underwater data center. The fact that no humans are around could be detrimental.
it wouldn't be too hard I don't think. It's a sealed tube so any attempts to get in could be detected with accelerometers or microphones.
Re: Microsoft's underwater data centre resurfaces after two years
#214Earlier quoted context omitted.
The issue is CO2, though, not heat per se. Yes, the two are correlated, but if you use renewables to power your things, it doesn't really matter how much heat you generate. Please correct me if I'm wrong.
> it doesn't really matter how much heat you generate Doesn’t matter is strong. It won’t in the short term. But as we continue increasing our energy use as a species, the simple thermal problem of waste-heat management will certainly surface.
Actually, in the long-term, waste-heat management is the only problem. Every other problem can be geo-engineered away, but we could never geo-engineer away thermodynamics.
Re: Microsoft's underwater data centre resurfaces after two years
#215I must ask, apart from the renewable energy factor, why do it in Orkney? There are many islands and archipelagos in Scotland, the Hebrides which are closer to the mainland but still out of the way of fishing. Many of them are going to be setup with tidal and wind generators. Would be interesting to see how it was tethered to the shore with networking and power. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2011/mar/17/10me…
Depending on the exact shape, sometimes dropping giant bits of steel in the ocean can be very good for shipping; we purposefully sink ships that are EOL for this exact purpose fairly often.
Re: Microsoft's underwater data centre resurfaces after two years
#216It seems an additional hurdle is anti-fouling. Those barnacles and algae act as an insulator, making the cold-water cooling advantage less and less of an advantage.
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Re: Microsoft's underwater data centre resurfaces after two years
#217I must ask, apart from the renewable energy factor, why do it in Orkney? There are many islands and archipelagos in Scotland, the Hebrides which are closer to the mainland but still out of the way of fishing. Many of them are going to be setup with tidal and wind generators. Would be interesting to see how it was tethered to the shore with networking and power. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2011/mar/17/10me…
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Re: Microsoft's underwater data centre resurfaces after two years
#218Earlier quoted context omitted.
>It takes about 80 watts to heat up a liter of water 1° celsius You're confusing power and energy here.
The formula for calculating this is: Q = c_p * d * V * (ΔT). Assuming an isobaric specific heat capacity of 4.18 J/(g K) and a density of 1.00 g/cm^3, heating a liter of water 1.00 K would take 4.18 kJ. Giving OP's number for the volume of water in the ocean, heating the ocean 0.01 K would be 5.4 * 10^22 J. Assuming 365 days in a year, that's 1.7 * 10^15 W, an order of magnitude less than OPs figure for datacenter po…
> an order of magnitude less than OPs figure for datacenter power-usage
You mean the figure that OP first increased by 4 orders of magnitude, right?
Re: Microsoft's underwater data centre resurfaces after two years
#219Earlier quoted context omitted.
If they patented it in 2017, I'm guessing it probably didn't make it in to this one, but the assumption is that the next version may have that technology.
That's a good enough reason to pull it out, replace/upgrade the equip, and drop it back in with the new setup (new sources of energy), and if they get the whole thing to transmit wireless-ly with a 1% failures per 2 years (8 out of the 855 servers) then it's a truly set-and-forget thing. And they can be bringing them up every 2-5-10 years to replace/upgrade the HW and drop it back in.
If that was the reason, we'd know about it from the PR release. This must have been a failure.
Re: Microsoft's underwater data centre resurfaces after two years
#220I wonder how you would deal with theft and espionage for an underwater data center. The fact that no humans are around could be detrimental.
Attack sharks should easily solve the problem. In fact I heard that Steve Balmer himself was seen under the water, frolicking among his peers.