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Microsoft's underwater data centre resurfaces after two years

bbc.co.uk

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Re: Microsoft's underwater data centre resurfaces after two years

#301

Post by nothal »

chmod775 wrote: post #283
gregd wrote: post #247

Does anyone know what the environmental ramifications are of sinking presumably noisy and hot tubes into the ocean? I've been in server rooms and they aren't exactly quiet. The picture of the racks look to me like standard 1U servers.

Well, marine life is not going to give a damn about warm tubes. There's plenty of natural heat sources in the ocean way more extreme than that. As for the noise, that can have a negative impact, but it's going to be nothing compared to the noise ships are making: https://www.npr.org/2020/07/20/891854646/whales-get-a-break-... Whether it's high-pitched or low-pitched noise also makes a huge difference underwater.

I wonder if the heat and noise of even a tenth of the data centers in the world would be still so harmless.

Re: Microsoft's underwater data centre resurfaces after two years

#302

Post by htgb »

jarvist wrote: post #262
crazygringo wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Heat is awfully hard to transfer in the first place, especially when it's not even that hot. It's handy if you can put your data center underneath a swimming pool, for example. But I'm not aware of any large-scale heat recovery projects from data centers. Data centers generally spend extra energy to remove the heat... But honestly who cares if your power comes from renewables in the first place -- solar and wind? It…

The new LUMI EU supercomputer in Finland will put its waste heat into a district heating system: https://www.hpcwire.com/off-the-wire/csc-lumi-supercomputer-... I'm sure smaller scale data centre heat to district heating schemes must already be in place. Fundamentally you are using the same technology to cool the data centre (a heat pump), just pushing that heat into hot-water / steam, rather than dumping into the ai…

This has been active in Stockholm for years, at least:

https://www.opendistrictheating.com/

Re: Microsoft's underwater data centre resurfaces after two years

#304

Post by tengbretson »

gregd wrote: post #247

Does anyone know what the environmental ramifications are of sinking presumably noisy and hot tubes into the ocean? I've been in server rooms and they aren't exactly quiet. The picture of the racks look to me like standard 1U servers.

If you can dump thermal energy into the ocean I suspect there wouldn't be much need for noisy fans.

Re: Microsoft's underwater data centre resurfaces after two years

#305

Post by alliao »

znpy wrote: post #7

Interestingly in the original article it said that the datacenter was meant to stay under water for five years. I wonder why they have pulled it out ahead of time. (source: https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-44368813 -- see video) edit: just to be clear, my questioning isn't meant to be read in a denigratory way. just wondering. Also thank to Kydlaw for pointing out that it actually said "up to five years".

probably didn't want to be trumped by google's zero carbon news..?

Re: Microsoft's underwater data centre resurfaces after two years

#307

Post by tyingq »

"The team is speculating that the greater reliability may be connected to the fact that there were no humans on board, and that nitrogen rather than oxygen was pumped into the capsule."

That does sound plausible. But I do wonder how much might have been due to extra care. If I were the sysadmin on the project, I probably would have spent extra time on component selection, cable seating, burn-in testing, etc. Lots of pressure for it to do well.

Edit: Unrelated, but this picture is funny to me. I don't think there's enough room to slide that server out, so I'm not sure what he's doing. https://ichef.bbci.co.uk/news/800/cpsprodpb/48D6/production/...

Re: Microsoft's underwater data centre resurfaces after two years

#308

Post by eru »

tyingq wrote: post #307

"The team is speculating that the greater reliability may be connected to the fact that there were no humans on board, and that nitrogen rather than oxygen was pumped into the capsule." That does sound plausible. But I do wonder how much might have been due to extra care. If I were the sysadmin on the project, I probably would have spent extra time on component selection, cable seating, burn-in testing, etc. Lots of…

They should have probably prepared two tubes like that, and flipped a coin to randomly dunk one in water, and leave the other one up?

Re: Microsoft's underwater data centre resurfaces after two years

#309

Post by WalterBright »

da_chicken wrote: post #266
geophertz wrote: post #237

The thing is that if putting data centers underwater solves the cooling problem, all the heat produced is wasted, so it this really a good solution?

The heat produced in a traditional data center is already unwanted and wasted and takes a ton of electricity and machinery to get rid of. Given that processors like to operate around 50 C, that's not a lot of heat to preserve and transport and do something useful with.

Maybe design electronics that are happy at higher temperatures?

Re: Microsoft's underwater data centre resurfaces after two years

#310

Post by hinkley »

scrollaway wrote: post #181
hinkley wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nobody needs more data centers, except for people trying to build their empires. People need services and data centers are how they get them. If data centers are expensive then I invest in efficiency work because 3 FTEs are cheaper than 2 additional data centers. If the centers are cheaper I will just burn watts to solve my problem, and spend those employees on something else.

You're describing demand.

I’m describing logistics.

And we were talking about whether we should, not whether we can. “Demand” can be a lot of things. Demand is not a justification.

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