31–40 of 43 posts
How big an issue is corrosion when using sea water for cooling? I thought this was why fire departments don't use salt water to put out fires.
Interestingly, Nokia started off as a Finnish paper mill. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia#Pre-telecommunications_er...
What's even more interesting is that prior deciding to produce mobile phones - Nokia's biggest asset was producing rubber boots.
I'm kind of confused why we care. It's another data center, big whoop. I am worried about the waste from warming sea water, but other than that, meh?
If you don't care, why comment? I am impressed at Google putting datacenters in cold climates for cheaper cooling. You know they have enough datacenters and custom software that they can migrate heavy compute jobs around the planet, keeping them running in night regions where the temperature is lower and cooling cheaper?
Was anyone able to glean Google's plans for the huge volumes of heated sea water 'waste'? I sure hope they're not planning on just pumping it back into the Baltic - warming of the world's oceans and seas is a very serious problem (see http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2010/07/temperature-ocean-... for a summary). It seems this only shifts their heat dissipation problem from having to cool servers to having to cool la…
Of course they are. Direct ocean cooling is common for power plants much larger than a data center, and the effect on water temperatures overall is trivial.
For some perspective. This data center may produce 10^7-10^8 watts of heat. A power plant may produce 10^9-10^10 W. The solar heating of the Baltic sea is 3x10^13 W. (337,000 km^2 x 100 W/m^2)
Was anyone able to glean Google's plans for the huge volumes of heated sea water 'waste'? I sure hope they're not planning on just pumping it back into the Baltic - warming of the world's oceans and seas is a very serious problem (see http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2010/07/temperature-ocean-... for a summary). It seems this only shifts their heat dissipation problem from having to cool servers to having to cool la…
In the video linked from the article, they mention that they are going to pump the outgoing water around the complex back to the sea and it will be nearly the same temperate as the sea water when it reaches back. I imagine they are going to use the cold air of the climate to reduce the heat.
No, they are discharging heat into the sea. Their outlet water is "nearly the same temperature" because the amount of water involved is immense (the article says the seawater intake is 2 meters wide). A large amount of heat, divided over a very large water flow, is diluted into a small temperature increase.
I've been wondering for a while why Google and others don't put data centers in Iceland. Electricity there is almost free of charge and has zero carbon footprint - in fact zero emissions of any sort. (It's geothermal.) The location is remote so you would have some extra latency but for lots of stuff that'd be fine.
This is also pertinent: http://www.zdnet.com/blog/datacenter/how-to-kill-the-datacen...
I've been wondering for a while why Google and others don't put data centers in Iceland. Electricity there is almost free of charge and has zero carbon footprint - in fact zero emissions of any sort. (It's geothermal.) The location is remote so you would have some extra latency but for lots of stuff that'd be fine.
Small country, where do you hire a lawyer with expertise in Icelandic IP law? How much jurisprudence is there?
Do you trust the government given that they just basically walked away from their bank guarantees
Interestingly, Nokia started off as a Finnish paper mill. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia#Pre-telecommunications_er...
What's even more interesting is that prior deciding to produce mobile phones - Nokia's biggest asset was producing rubber boots.
Just out of curiosity, is this were you found out about it?
How big an issue is corrosion when using sea water for cooling? I thought this was why fire departments don't use salt water to put out fires.
They probably use a two loop system so most of their pipes are not filled with salt water.
[We will be] taking the heat outside of the building and
using cold [sea] water to remove it
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Many power plants heat sea water (either for steam or cooling), I think the ocean can handle a data center just fine. Update: I should add that I'm all for environmental study to make sure that they aren't venting it out in a sensitive ecosystem or at a radically different temp. Done correctly this can be an important development towards sustainable data centers.
We're talking about the baltic sea here. Its average depth is 55m. Besides, it's already quite contaminated so there is a lot of environmental protection going around it. http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/eb/BalticSea... As you can see, there really isn't places for the water to flow back and forth, so it's not a case of "the ocean is going to handle it" Always consider the context.