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Microsoft has sunk a data centre in the sea to investigate energy efficiency

bbc.com

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Re: Microsoft has sunk a data centre in the sea to investigate energy efficiency

#301

Post by yarrel »

amalcon wrote: post #297
sebleon wrote: post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> we know Bitcoin doesn’t scale to handle the volume of transactions needed No longer true. I used to believe this as well, but I’ve been blown away by the work from Lightning Network [1]. Subsecond transactions that happen off the Bitcoin blockchain, scales beautifully. [1] http://lightning.network

Does that actually exist? It was vaporware for a pretty long time (though admittedly, I haven't checked in more than a year).

It does exist and work. It's early days but you can now use it. Source: I bought a sticker using it. :-)

Re: Microsoft has sunk a data centre in the sea to investigate energy efficiency

#303

Post by deegles »

rtkwe wrote: post #295
deegles wrote: post #280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Physical gold still needs to be mined, smelted, transported, and guarded. When you buy it and move it around energy is spent too. So if you really want an apples-to-apples comparison you'd have to count the energy needed to mine each oz. of gold.

The large majority of gold traded for bullion or investment isn't actually moved. It's just the rights to claim X tr. oz. of gold in the vault of XYZ company. Also value of my gold doesn't depend on the transport of all the gold out there so rolling those costs in at the individual level doesn't make much sense. BTC on the otherhand is useless without mining because the existence and transfer of BTC depends on the mi…

The large majority of Bitcoin isn't actually moved every block either. And those systems you describe to reassign rights to gold also use energy. As block rewards fall, profit will come from transaction fees only, and only the most efficient miners (best equipment or energy access) will remain. Sure, Bitcoin uses more energy now than a database sitting on a server, but it's solving a different problem.

Re: Microsoft has sunk a data centre in the sea to investigate energy efficiency

#304

Post by WalterBright »

dwyerm wrote: post #254
WalterBright wrote: post #71

I don't understand why not locating it in a city in a cold climate and using the waste heat to heat the city buildings? There is precedent. In Seattle there's the old "steam plant" which piped steam to many local buildings to heat them in winter.

You're talking about District Heating[1], and that's been around for decades in hundreds of cities. It's the source of the steaming manhole covers that are a fixture of noir imagery. Denver's got the oldest continually operating system in the world, and within the last decade or so, they added a cooling loop, as well. Instead of a boiler and a cooling tower, you can subscribe to a steam loop and a chiller loop. The p…

> At best they make warm water only a couple of dozen degrees over ambient

Consider that geothermal heating systems are based on the ground having a temperature of 55 degrees. The difference between that and cooler ambient is used to drastically reduce heating bills.

For example, if it is 30 degrees outside, that is heated to 55 by the earth, then the building heater only has to boost the 55 to 70 rather than 30 to 70.

Re: Microsoft has sunk a data centre in the sea to investigate energy efficiency

#305

Post by reaperducer »

gascan wrote: post #258
becomingknown wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's kind of a clever idea to promote renewable energy.

Coupling an undersea datacenter with an offshore windfarm just sounds all-around clever.

Until a hurricane destroys it.

Re: Microsoft has sunk a data centre in the sea to investigate energy efficiency

#306

Post by HankB99 »

overcast wrote: post #180
mpweiher wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think part of it is that even problems that are small/unnoticeable at the individual level become big when multiplied by a huge N. For example, I don't think I've ever had a hard drive fail in ~30 years in computing, well without being dropped that is, yet look at the Backblaze reports: https://www.backblaze.com/blog/hard-drive-benchmark-stats-20...

That's just unbelievable. To even survive the Deskstar era blows my mind. Not a single drive?

Up until a couple years ago I could have said the same. I even have a couple deathstars on the shelf that were operational when retired.

In the last couple years I've had several HDDs fail starting with a 2TB Seagate (one of the "stars" in the Backblaze stats.) I've had others fail since, mostly multi-TB drives. I had one nearly ten year old 200GB drive begin to report remapped sectors. I've even had an SSD develop an unrecoverable error.

Re: Microsoft has sunk a data centre in the sea to investigate energy efficiency

#307

Post by rtkwe »

deegles wrote: post #303
rtkwe wrote: post #295

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The large majority of gold traded for bullion or investment isn't actually moved. It's just the rights to claim X tr. oz. of gold in the vault of XYZ company. Also value of my gold doesn't depend on the transport of all the gold out there so rolling those costs in at the individual level doesn't make much sense. BTC on the otherhand is useless without mining because the existence and transfer of BTC depends on the mi…

The large majority of Bitcoin isn't actually moved every block either. And those systems you describe to reassign rights to gold also use energy. As block rewards fall, profit will come from transaction fees only, and only the most efficient miners (best equipment or energy access) will remain. Sure, Bitcoin uses more energy now than a database sitting on a server, but it's solving a different problem.

It is solving a different problem but that doesn't change the fact that the whole network's mining work is required to make it work. There are some energy costs to tracking the rights of stored gold but they're vanishingly small compared to BTC.

We're getting sucked down into the weeds here and losing sight of the original point which is BTC as designed requires the use of massive amount of energy to validate and secure the transaction ledger and that ledger and the things it enables is the whole value of BTC.

Re: Microsoft has sunk a data centre in the sea to investigate energy efficiency

#308

Post by cdiddy2 »

amalcon wrote: post #297
sebleon wrote: post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> we know Bitcoin doesn’t scale to handle the volume of transactions needed No longer true. I used to believe this as well, but I’ve been blown away by the work from Lightning Network [1]. Subsecond transactions that happen off the Bitcoin blockchain, scales beautifully. [1] http://lightning.network

Does that actually exist? It was vaporware for a pretty long time (though admittedly, I haven't checked in more than a year).

Yes but its still in beta on the mainnet so its not ready for daily use yet. You can see all the nodes here https://lnmainnet.gaben.win/

Re: Microsoft has sunk a data centre in the sea to investigate energy efficiency

#309

Post by edhu2017 »

coffeeacc wrote: post #240
cc-d wrote: post #193

> There has been growing concern that the rapid expansion of the data centre industry could mean an explosion in energy use. But Emma Fryer, who represents the sector at Tech UK, says that fear has been exaggerated. If we're concerned about the technology industry vastly increasing energy consumption, lets look at the entire medium sized country's worth of energy bitcoin is consuming for absolutely useless calculatio…

Task for some more suited than me: turn transactions into protein representations, and every mining operation becomes a folding operation.

Here's the problem for me. These mining operations can be exploited to an extreme. Any scientist or professor with knowledge in protein representations will have an unfair advantage over normal miners. This gap will be even larger than the hashpower gaps we see between ASICs and "normal" miners in bitcoin, litecoin, etc because scientists will have access to not only hardware but also extremely specific domain knowledge.

Re: Microsoft has sunk a data centre in the sea to investigate energy efficiency

#310

Post by gowld »

coffeeacc wrote: post #240
cc-d wrote: post #193

> There has been growing concern that the rapid expansion of the data centre industry could mean an explosion in energy use. But Emma Fryer, who represents the sector at Tech UK, says that fear has been exaggerated. If we're concerned about the technology industry vastly increasing energy consumption, lets look at the entire medium sized country's worth of energy bitcoin is consuming for absolutely useless calculatio…

Task for some more suited than me: turn transactions into protein representations, and every mining operation becomes a folding operation.

The problem with solving "real" problems instead of synthetic ones is that they aren't uniformly difficult, so clever people will game the system.
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