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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

#341

Post by eklavyaa »

defnotashton2 wrote: post #340
eklavyaa wrote: post #338

They are only discussing about how they can make it more efficient. As far as I understand one kind of cost cutting they are aiming is energy and money required in "Cooling" systems, ya I read about less failure cases too. But putting a heat generating device under water will have adverse effect on underwater ecosystem surrounding it.

The same is true of land based operations ha IMG environmental impact, there is a whole lot more sea than land.

are you trying to say we can afford to alter sea because its alot than land ?

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

#342

Post by eklavyaa »

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.

sad,the way you have presumed marine life behaviour.

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

#343

Post by kumarvvr »

eklavyaa wrote: post #338

They are only discussing about how they can make it more efficient. As far as I understand one kind of cost cutting they are aiming is energy and money required in "Cooling" systems, ya I read about less failure cases too. But putting a heat generating device under water will have adverse effect on underwater ecosystem surrounding it.

Cooling underwater does not produce additional carbon. Cooling in normal data centers, produces a lot of carbon (in case they are using solar panels, production of those panels generates short term carbon).

I would definitely choose the former over the latter.

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

#344

Post by cdmckay »

Zenbit_UX wrote: post #319
perl4ever wrote: post #315

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This: "there were no humans on board" Made me think of this: "The factory of the future will have only two employees, a man and a dog. The man will be there to feed the dog. The dog will be there to keep the man from touching the equipment."

Is there more to that quote that makes it make sense? Otherwise both the human and the dog are redundant as a pair as their purposes are circular and don't benefit the factory.

You must be great at parties

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

#345

Post by pegasus »

__MatrixMan__ wrote: post #186
jakear wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The beauty of the phrase is that it’s universal.

Is it? I want to talk with aliens as much as the next guy, but so far it seems like the vast majority of the universe is a vacuum--biologically speaking.

Physically too. But it's a question of perspective: glass half-empty or half-full. Are planetary systems plentiful? It seems so, as a ratio of all star systems - as far as we know at least. Definitely not, as a ratio of the total volume of space. Similarly, the idea that we are mostly vacuum, because the elementary particles are so small compared to the size of molecules, etc. But that doesn't much change our intuitions about solidity vs. emptiness in every day life.

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

#347

Post by jwr »

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…

> there were no humans on board

Back when I worked at a supercomputing center, we had "operators" on duty, who were supposed to visit the machine room every 2-3h or so and check several things.

It turned out that they were the major cause of hangs and reboots of our SunSITE server (a large FTP archive) — walking on the lifted datacenter floor caused vibrations which were enough to disturb the (terrible) external SCSI connectors to multiple drive arrays.

So, I can certainly believe that statement.

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

#348

Post by Aachen »

crazygringo wrote: post #245
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?

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…

> I'm not aware of any large-scale heat recovery projects from data centers.

I don't know what you'd call large-scale, but the school I went to was entirely heated by the datacenter across the road and the DC still had plenty of heat to spare. Afaik they heat all of Science Park Amsterdam with the Equinix DC just to the east: https://osm.org/go/0E6VOVkQc-. I think it was a requirement of the local government that this waste product be reused. Amsterdam has also had a datacenter stop due to power supply issues.

Edit: this seems to be the press release (only source I could find): https://www.equinix.com/newsroom/press-releases/pr/122801/eq... "Third data center in amsterdam" matches that this DC is called Equinix AM3, and it says "Excess heat from the data center will be used to warm nearby buildings and for other third-party uses."

Not to say that this happens with all the data centers across the world, but if using a decent chunk of a DC's waste heat isn't a large-scale heat recovery project, then I'm not sure what would be.

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

#349

Post by saagarjha »

tyingq wrote: post #317
SoylentOrange wrote: post #314

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A friend of mine wrote a paper on the effects of cosmic rays on memory errors in data centers a few years ago[1]. He also posited they had effects on hard drive reliability. The first thing I thought of when reading this article is whether the increased shielding from the water reduced the impact of cosmic rays on the hardware. [1]: https://www.cs.toronto.edu/~bianca/papers/ASPLOS2012.pdf

Sun Microsystems had some Sparc servers where the on die cache didn't have ECC. And, cosmic rays created issues: https://docs.oracle.com/cd/E19095-01/sf4810.srvr/816-5053-10...

In a more dramatic example, Virginia Tech strung together over a thousand PowerMac G5s in a cluster they called the “Big Mac”, and it was one of the fastest (and cheapest) supercomputers of the world at the time. Unfortunately its lack of ECC RAM made its failure rate so high it would have trouble even booting. They dismantled it and sold the machines away one at a time and replaced the entire thing with an Xserve array instead, which had ECC.

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

#350

Post by jacquesm »

ithkuil wrote: post #87
mlyle wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you use renewables, you're using heat that is already around on the planet. As long as you don't change planetary albedo, equilibrium temperature is the same. Of course, heating water locally, etc, can cause its own environmental impacts.

this! another way to look at it: your solar panels are temporarily "stealing" heat generated by sun rays hitting a surface of equivalent color. When you use electricity to do some work, it will be turned back to heat. so if you want to be 100% "heat neutral", all you have to do is to ensure that for every square meter of solar panels you also paint an proportionate area with a color that reflects the right amount of…

Solar panels don't work on IR, they work on visible light.

IR might be reflected or absorbed.

The visible component is absorbed. Whether it would have turned into heat or reflected back in to space is about a 1 in two chance.

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