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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

#381

Post by pvaldes »

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".

> was meant to stay under water for five years

Teddy, Vicky, Paulette, Sally and René?. Better playing safe than sorry, I suppose

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

#382

Post by pvaldes »

eru wrote: post #311
HenryBemis wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a good enough reason to pull it out, replace/upgrade the equip, and drop it back in with the new setup (new sources of energy), and if they get the whole thing to transmit wireless-ly with a 1% failures per 2 years (8 out of the 855 servers) then it's a truly set-and-forget thing. And they can be bringing them up every 2-5-10 years to replace/upgrade the HW and drop it back in.

Microsoft probably has enough money that they could leave the original one in, and pop down a new one with the new green energy. (Of course, individual projects still have finite budgets.)

I assume that the project approved by the UK government specifies some requirements about environment protection and the fate of the material.

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

#383

Post by ric2b »

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…

> so I'm not sure what he's doing.

Maybe securing the vertical bars after the entire thing slides horizontally into the tube?

I'm assuming the tube has some rails they use to slide the racks in but then they have to be properly secured in place.

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

#384

Post by thw0rted »

tengbretson wrote: post #304
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.

I was curious about this. The trick is moving the heat from the components (CPU/GPU/RAM/PSU/storage/etc) to the hull. It's full of nitrogen, but the heat would conduct much better via liquid (heat pipe) than gas (fans). The photos make it look like these are standard server racks, though, so there must be fans pumping the heat away from the components. Right?

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

#385

Post by eru »

cutemonster wrote: post #377
eru wrote: post #311

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Microsoft probably has enough money that they could leave the original one in, and pop down a new one with the new green energy. (Of course, individual projects still have finite budgets.)

Building a new one would take more time

Yes, but they can build multiple in parallel.

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

#386

Post by ADefenestrator »

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…

It's a bit hard when the temperature deltas are so small, though. It probably works well if you're pre-heating air before the main heat source in a very cold region, but otherwise you'd need to use some sort of heat pump to get it to move around.
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