Iceland looks to serve the world. • Hacker News Board

Re: Iceland looks to serve the world.

#11

Post by stcredzero » Thu, Oct 15, 2009, 10:36 PM UTC

tlb wrote: post #8

A company would save greater than half a million metric tons of carbon annually by putting their data center in Iceland. A typical server uses 1 ton / year. Not many companies have more than half a million servers. Perhaps only about 2 companies.

Just how many data centers have even close to 100,000 machines in them? There can't be that many of them, but the article makes this sound commonplace. There are probably quite a few installations with 100's and 1000's of machines. Once you get into 5 digit numbers, you are starting to reach rarified heights.

Re: Iceland looks to serve the world.

#12

Post by rbranson » Thu, Oct 15, 2009, 10:52 PM UTC

stcredzero wrote: post #11

tlb wrote: post #8

A company would save greater than half a million metric tons of carbon annually by putting their data center in Iceland. A typical server uses 1 ton / year. Not many companies have more than half a million servers. Perhaps only about 2 companies.

Just how many data centers have even close to 100,000 machines in them? There can't be that many of them, but the article makes this sound commonplace. There are probably quite a few installations with 100's and 1000's of machines. Once you get into 5 digit numbers, you are starting to reach rarified heights.

The problem is in the explosive growth. The demand for computing power has grown dramatically over the last few years because of the shift to cloud computing and the fact that people are expecting "smarter and smarter" and "more and more" and "faster and faster." If Google had 10x the datacenter capacity, it could (theoretically) crawl the web 10x faster and return more up to date results.

Re: Iceland looks to serve the world.

#13

Post by gojomo » Thu, Oct 15, 2009, 10:52 PM UTC

m_eiman wrote: post #5

jsm386 wrote: post #2

Do you really want to build your data center on top of 130 volcanoes? The island has about 130 volcanic mountains, of which 18 have erupted since the settlement of Iceland. Over the past 500 years, Iceland's volcanoes have erupted a third of the total global lava output. - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volcanism_of_Iceland

I can't recall ever hearing about a volcano on Iceland threatening people, though. The earthquakes are probably a bigger problem, since they affect a larger area don't all occur in specific locations. Design the building properly and even that shouldn't be a big problem.

In 1783 the Laki volcano killed about a quarter of the Icelandic population, due to both poisoning and an ensuing famine. That volcano also appeared to have global climate effects:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laki

Re: Iceland looks to serve the world.

#14

Post by rbranson » Thu, Oct 15, 2009, 10:53 PM UTC

jsm386 wrote: post #2

Do you really want to build your data center on top of 130 volcanoes? The island has about 130 volcanic mountains, of which 18 have erupted since the settlement of Iceland. Over the past 500 years, Iceland's volcanoes have erupted a third of the total global lava output. - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volcanism_of_Iceland

I'm thinking this is going to be more for "batch compute" type operations where you'd probably have data replicated across multiple sites and the latency won't impact the job significantly.

Re: Iceland looks to serve the world.

#15

Post by pyre » Fri, Oct 16, 2009, 12:02 AM UTC

rbranson wrote: post #12

stcredzero wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just how many data centers have even close to 100,000 machines in them? There can't be that many of them, but the article makes this sound commonplace. There are probably quite a few installations with 100's and 1000's of machines. Once you get into 5 digit numbers, you are starting to reach rarified heights.

The problem is in the explosive growth. The demand for computing power has grown dramatically over the last few years because of the shift to cloud computing and the fact that people are expecting "smarter and smarter" and "more and more" and "faster and faster." If Google had 10x the datacenter capacity, it could (theoretically) crawl the web 10x faster and return more up to date results.

If you really want to get picky though, more web crawling from Google means more energy usage on the other end of the line (the crawled server).

Re: Iceland looks to serve the world.

#16

Post by conflux0 » Fri, Oct 16, 2009, 12:09 AM UTC

hmmmm wrote: post #10

A couple of problems: Iceland is small so although it has an image as a cool sensible safe Scandinavian country it wouldn't take many voters to put in a far right/far left president who might screw up your business model. Do you know the details of Icelandic law? Does your corporate lawyers? Your regulation compliance officers? How many Icelandic Intelectual Property specialists can you hire tomorrow? There is a reas…

It shouldn't be too much of an issue considering Iceland is going to eventually join the EU.

Re: Iceland looks to serve the world.

#17

Post by hmmmm » Fri, Oct 16, 2009, 12:17 AM UTC

conflux0 wrote: post #16

hmmmm wrote: post #10

A couple of problems: Iceland is small so although it has an image as a cool sensible safe Scandinavian country it wouldn't take many voters to put in a far right/far left president who might screw up your business model. Do you know the details of Icelandic law? Does your corporate lawyers? Your regulation compliance officers? How many Icelandic Intelectual Property specialists can you hire tomorrow? There is a reas…

It shouldn't be too much of an issue considering Iceland is going to eventually join the EU.

Austria is in the EU, would you trust Jörg Haider with your gay rights mailing list?

Re: Iceland looks to serve the world.

#18

Post by euccastro » Fri, Oct 16, 2009, 2:07 AM UTC

die_sekte wrote: post #3

jsm386 wrote: post #2

Do you really want to build your data center on top of 130 volcanoes? The island has about 130 volcanic mountains, of which 18 have erupted since the settlement of Iceland. Over the past 500 years, Iceland's volcanoes have erupted a third of the total global lava output. - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volcanism_of_Iceland

They also have a lot of earthquakes. But then, Japan has lots of earthquakes and quite a bit of storms and rain and people still live there. There are also regular devastating hurricanes in the Caribbean and the south-east USA and people also still live there!

Isn't the San Francisco area prone to earthquakes too?

Re: Iceland looks to serve the world.

#19

Post by siculars » Fri, Oct 16, 2009, 3:23 AM UTC

I think this is a great idea. Iceland needs a new industry and this just makes sense. Data centers are to the tech age as factories were to the industrial revolution.

The government can ensure/facilitate high speed fiber links to the continent and then let the rest take care of itself. As long as there is enough network capacity this should be a no-brainer.

Re: Iceland looks to serve the world.

#20

Post by KiwiNige » Fri, Oct 16, 2009, 5:07 AM UTC

rbranson wrote: post #14

jsm386 wrote: post #2

Do you really want to build your data center on top of 130 volcanoes? The island has about 130 volcanic mountains, of which 18 have erupted since the settlement of Iceland. Over the past 500 years, Iceland's volcanoes have erupted a third of the total global lava output. - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volcanism_of_Iceland

I'm thinking this is going to be more for "batch compute" type operations where you'd probably have data replicated across multiple sites and the latency won't impact the job significantly.

I was thinking of shared hosting for all those little web sites too. They must add up to a lot of power/cooling