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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

#91

Post by cinquemb »

talltimtom wrote: post #79
nomercy400 wrote: post #75

Putting your datacenter in international waters, without laws or regulations, hidden from the world. Such a great way to do things without people knowing, or having people do things about it. Power it with offshore windmills, and you really only need a network connection. Great idea though, using water to cool your datacenter and leaving all the oxygen out.

Why would the physical location of the server matter with respect to people knowing what you are doing? I have no idear where googles servers are when I fire off a search for cute cats in boxes, yet I still know what it’s doing. As for “without laws” google still follows European laws even if my search happens to be handled on an American or British machine. You obey the laws where you operate not where your server i…

For companies who are already complying with laws in whatever jurisdiction I'd have to agree with what you are saying.

But if the economics in the future make sense on some level, I could see criminal enterprises interested in exploring things like this. If narco's are building/using submarines now, I could see them managing/tracking/monitoring a global logistics from their sunken data centers (they'll need to find other ways to power and transmit/receive, because I doubt they could just hook up their cables directly onshore anywhere, setting aside being an easy choke-point to cut access).

Maybe future narcos, illegal EU personal data miners/brokers, pirates or who else for whatever could be interested, esp if the fixed cost of operating stuff now/future > operating/ future sunken data centers and probability/cost of seizure now/future > probability/cost with future sunken datacenters?

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

#92

Post by tomglynch »

polvs wrote: post #89

We have been following this since Microsoft launched project Natick in 2015[1]. Comupting has a large effect on our planet, data centers consume over 6% of the world's electricity (more than India) and generate over 4% of the world's CO2 emmissions (twice that of commercial air-travel)[2]. The approach taken by Microsoft is a nice PR-stunt but we think it's impractical/difficult to carry out maintenance and leads to…

Hi Polvs, I believe we met in Berlin. I hadn't seen immersion cooling before then but was absolutely impressed. Unfortunately setup costs are quite restrictive, but for large scale organisations it does make sense.

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

#93

Post by Redoubts »

Some non-environmental reasons for wanting to do this:

http://www.alexwg.org/publications/PhysRevE_82-056104.pdf

> Optimal intermediate trading node locations for all pairs of 52 major securities exchanges, calculated using Eq. 9 as midpoints weighted by turnover velocity... While some nodes are in regions with dense fiber-optic networks, many others are in the ocean or other sparsely connected regions.

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

#94

Post by dmurray »

choonway wrote: post #74

I don't think this is done for the sake of efficiency, but rather latency. For example, if you had a underwater data center that sat in the middle of the atlantic ocean in between new york and london, you could do some serious trading with that capability.

No, you could not. You would gain nothing over having a datacentre in London and a datacentre in New York and a low latency link between them.

You can note, for example, that there is no data centre half way between Chicago and New York, even though that area has cheap accessible real estate and billions of dollars have been spent on low latency communication links between the two.

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

#95

Post by Moter8 »

masklinn wrote: post #53
alexghr wrote: post #36

At what point does this become a problem? They're using the naturally cool sea water to regulate the temperature in the container, but that heat needs to go somewhere... it heats the water. If this becomes a popular alternative to classic server farms, at what point does it start to increase the temperature of the sea? I know, the oceans are big, but so is our data.

> I know, the oceans are big, but so is our data. Meh. The biggest data center (ChinaTel's Inner Mongolia Information Park) consumes about 150MWe, assuming all of it becomes waste heat it's basically nothing: a nuclear reactor (each plant has 2~8) releases 2Wt for each We it produces, and they're usually sized between 800 and 1300MWe. Hell, earth averages 160W/m^2 from the sun, oceans cover 360m km^2, so oceans get 1…

Even Greenpeace at least doesn't think that it's a bad idea:

"Experimental underwater data centres could be more sustainable if connected to offshore wind power, but Microsoft must focus more on investing in new renewable energy now. [...]"

https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-35472189

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

#96

Post by Redoubts »

choonway wrote: post #74

I don't think this is done for the sake of efficiency, but rather latency. For example, if you had a underwater data center that sat in the middle of the atlantic ocean in between new york and london, you could do some serious trading with that capability.

Indeed. http://www.alexwg.org/publications/PhysRevE_82-056104.pdf

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

#97

Post by hvidgaard »

petre wrote: post #63
alexghr wrote: post #36

At what point does this become a problem? They're using the naturally cool sea water to regulate the temperature in the container, but that heat needs to go somewhere... it heats the water. If this becomes a popular alternative to classic server farms, at what point does it start to increase the temperature of the sea? I know, the oceans are big, but so is our data.

It cools back down when the water evaporates. But it doesn't do the oceans any good anyhow because thea heat also fuels algae blooms. I doubt it will become popular because it involves waterproofing the enclosures, complicates maintenance staff access, and also carries the risk of water getting in and damaging the equipment. There are other alternatives to AC. Using a cooling tower is a much better alternative to sub…

This is mostly aimed at large cloud providers such as Amazon, Google, and Microsoft. They can use units like this and take them up for scheduled maintenance every x years. What happens to some of the individual servers between maintenance is of less importance. The infrastructure can handle the failures and they can just turn off the affected servers if they cannot fulfill any role.

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

#98

Post by kryptiskt »

nomercy400 wrote: post #75

Putting your datacenter in international waters, without laws or regulations, hidden from the world. Such a great way to do things without people knowing, or having people do things about it. Power it with offshore windmills, and you really only need a network connection. Great idea though, using water to cool your datacenter and leaving all the oxygen out.

If your data center isn't registered and flying a flag, won't it be salvage and belong to whoever recovers it?

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

#99

Post by Radim »

masklinn wrote: post #53
alexghr wrote: post #36

At what point does this become a problem? They're using the naturally cool sea water to regulate the temperature in the container, but that heat needs to go somewhere... it heats the water. If this becomes a popular alternative to classic server farms, at what point does it start to increase the temperature of the sea? I know, the oceans are big, but so is our data.

> I know, the oceans are big, but so is our data. Meh. The biggest data center (ChinaTel's Inner Mongolia Information Park) consumes about 150MWe, assuming all of it becomes waste heat it's basically nothing: a nuclear reactor (each plant has 2~8) releases 2Wt for each We it produces, and they're usually sized between 800 and 1300MWe. Hell, earth averages 160W/m^2 from the sun, oceans cover 360m km^2, so oceans get 1…

In addition, the heat represents extra energy. Warmth and water (and carbon) are the very fabric of life. Nature will adapt to utilize this free energy source before you could say "thank you".

My prediction is we'll be amazed at the life forms that develop and explode around such submerged cooling structures.

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

#100

Post by jakobegger »

aalleavitch wrote: post #72
alexghr wrote: post #36

At what point does this become a problem? They're using the naturally cool sea water to regulate the temperature in the container, but that heat needs to go somewhere... it heats the water. If this becomes a popular alternative to classic server farms, at what point does it start to increase the temperature of the sea? I know, the oceans are big, but so is our data.

If the heat becomes enough, couldn’t we recycle it?

No, because you can not convert heat alone into energy. You need a heat difference (something hot and something cold). And the efficiency of the conversion depends on the temperature difference.
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