[HN Gopher] Microsoft's underwater data centre resurfaces after ...
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Microsoft's underwater data centre resurfaces after two years
Author : Qworg
Score : 543 points
Date : 2020-09-14 15:00 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.bbc.co.uk)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.bbc.co.uk)
| luxurycommunism wrote:
| There is little to no doubt that the big data centers of the 22nd
| century will be in space. The less oxygen, the lower the failure
| rate. I am curious how many experiments have been done with
| running computers around different elements. I know the cooling
| scene is obsessessed with near zero kelvin CPU performance and
| obviously NASA has to run and test if their tech works in zero
| gravity vacuum.
|
| >He believes organisations facing a natural disaster or a
| terrorist attack might find it attractive: "You could effectively
| move something to a more secure location without having all the
| huge infrastructure costs of constructing a building. It's
| flexible and cost effective."
|
| Also like this implication. It's obvious that the DoD would be
| highly interested in such a thing.
| sandworm101 wrote:
| Nobody talking about the potential military applications of a
| hardened processing infrastructure underwater? Once upon a time
| Russia toyed with the idea of putting ICBM silos at the bottom of
| lakes. Say you wanted to run a network of hydrophones on the
| seafloor. You might want to do the data processing in-situ rather
| than transmit everything back to shore. If I were microsoft I
| might be interested in those potential contracts.
| sangnoir wrote:
| > Once upon a time Russia toyed with the idea of putting ICBM
| silos at the bottom of lakes
|
| Was this before or after nuclear submarines were a thing? I
| think maintenance is much easier with a submersible than
| something affixed to a lakebed.
| pbhjpbhj wrote:
| Perhaps they can be paired with seaweed farms to improve growth
| rate; feed the seaweed to cattle to reduce methane.
| sradman wrote:
| > Microsoft's Project Natick team deployed the Northern Isles
| datacenter 117 feet deep to the seafloor in June 2018. For the
| next two years, team members tested and monitored the performance
| of the datacenter's servers. [1]
|
| [1] https://natick.research.microsoft.com/
| znpy wrote:
| 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".
| noisy_boy wrote:
| Some executive probably said "I think it would be good to take
| stock of the experiment now to reduce time-risk and arrive at a
| decision point regarding future strategy".
| badRNG wrote:
| It increasingly seems that public businesses seem incapable
| of making long-term plans, even rather trivial ones, if the
| cost of ending the experiment results in immediate gains. The
| driving force is the single most important metric: this
| quarter's upcoming earnings report. Businesses that tend to
| place bets on multi-year investments are either privately
| held (e.g. SpaceX) or are participating in specific
| public/private partnerships.
|
| While I do think we are seeing the limits of what a publicly-
| traded company can actually realize, there are of course
| counterexamples: Google always seems to have multiple irons
| in the fire, and there are many other examples in the
| comments on this discussion of corporate research labs:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24200764
| xwdv wrote:
| You get diminishing returns holding it down there for 5
| years for no reason.
|
| If not much has happened after 2 years we're good to go. We
| need to get into the future as fast as possible.
| badRNG wrote:
| The difference between 2 years and 5 is quite significant
| for server runtime above water. This argument of
| diminishing returns would hold better for placing it 1
| year rather than 2, 9 months rather than 12, etc.
|
| If the concern is that you'd see significant failure
| after 5 (which is likely) which could undercut your
| future plans, I could understand cutting the plan short.
| ses1984 wrote:
| It seems reasonable to apply Bayes theorem. If the
| failure rate underwater after 2 years is less than
| normal..
| badRNG wrote:
| From my anecdotal experience working in data centers
| early in my career, you really don't really know if your
| failure rate for a specific type of drive/server is
| atypical for quite some time. This information is
| critical for many businesses, as choosing which drive or
| which architecture model can have profound cost
| implications.
|
| It's quite possible that failures at the 5 year mark wont
| maintain a proportionate ratio with failures at the 2
| year mark when compared to control. Maybe drive "A" tends
| to have an unacceptably high failure rate only after "X"
| hours of up-time.
| nimish wrote:
| Presumably they got the data they needed? Whether it's worth
| doing at scale.
| Kydlaw wrote:
| [1] mentions "up to 5 five years". But your question still hold
|
| [1] https://natick.research.microsoft.com/
| abhinuvpitale wrote:
| I think their phase 2 is going to be the five year project.
| This one was supposed to be a POC.
|
| Based off https://natick.research.microsoft.com/
| akhilcacharya wrote:
| Was the load in the data center synthetic, or did it handle
| production traffic? Curious to see how they split it out.
|
| I doubt there's a "Orkney-Underwater" region.
| miyuru wrote:
| The official site has the info you are looking for.
|
| "Natick was used to perform COVID-19 research for Folding at
| Home and World Community Grid."
|
| Also the data center designation for it was "Northern Isles"
| (SSDC-002).
|
| https://natick.research.microsoft.com/
| [deleted]
| MiroF wrote:
| Almost certainly synthetic
| wiredone wrote:
| "We are hopeful that we can look at our findings and say maybe we
| don't need to have quite as much infrastructure focused on power
| and reliability."
|
| I was left wondering whether they were referring to the project,
| or just Azure Availability in general. /s
| spamizbad wrote:
| Very interesting to see a lower failure rate. Is it simply a
| function of possibly better thermals than your average
| datacenter? Less EMR?
| mleonhard wrote:
| Other explanations:
|
| - Technicians were extra careful (slow) when installing the
| equipment.
|
| - The datacenter pod used no recycled parts. Traditional
| datacenters are full of recycled marginal-quality parts.
| Maintenance teams balance the cost of buying new parts, the
| cost of testing used parts, and the labor & downtime costs from
| recycled parts failing.
|
| Extreme reliability is already achievable but not economical.
| One reason why Google Search beats Bing is that Google's
| infrastructure software is more tolerant of flaky hardware, so
| Google can spend less money on hardware maintenance, reducing
| the cost per search.
|
| Hopefully Microsoft will release a report and tell us the
| source of the underwater datacenter pod's low failure rate.
| rplnt wrote:
| Besides reasons mentioned in the article (no oxygen, no humans
| to bump into stuff), I wonder if radiation could play a role.
| Cosmic rays, maybe just less radio sources around (tons of
| other servers).
| jacquesm wrote:
| Impossible to touch it. Better (oxygen poor) environment for
| circuitry.
| gerbal wrote:
| The container was filed with Nitrogen, so no pesky Oxygen
| corroding everything.
| m1n1 wrote:
| Isn't digging easier than dealing with the ocean?
| aaron695 wrote:
| For anyone with a brain this is a dumb idea.
|
| Of course we get an unquestioning BBC article.
|
| If you dump it in landfill or a random corn field this still
| holds
|
| "We think it has to do with this nitrogen atmosphere that reduces
| corrosion and is cool, and people not banging things around"
|
| But it was underwater and that made it magical! Which I honestly
| think it did. It's still a garbage practical idea though.
| scientific_ass wrote:
| Microsoft patented the way to power these data centers using
| tidal energy in ocean itself. They patented in 2017.
|
| http://www.whatafuture.com/microsoft-underwater-data-centers...
| lscotte wrote:
| "All of Orkney's electricity comes from wind and solar power"
| ehsankia wrote:
| If they patented it in 2017, I'm guessing it probably didn't
| make it in to this one, but the assumption is that the next
| version may have that technology.
| HenryBemis wrote:
| 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.
| entropicdrifter wrote:
| One would imagine that the signal to noise ratio for
| wireless data transmission in the ocean would be pretty
| abysmal. That said, there's no reason why they couldn't
| just run a fiber optic cable out from it, as long as it's
| designed to rotate around said cable.
| manderley wrote:
| If that was the reason, we'd know about it from the PR
| release. This must have been a failure.
| mothsonasloth wrote:
| I must ask, apart from the renewable energy factor, why do it in
| Orkney?
|
| There are many islands and archipelagos in Scotland, the Hebrides
| which are closer to the mainland but still out of the way of
| fishing.
|
| Many of them are going to be setup with tidal and wind
| generators.
|
| Would be interesting to see how it was tethered to the shore with
| networking and power.
|
| https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2011/mar/17/10megawa...
| alex_duf wrote:
| I've heard about Orkney quite a lot, I think it must simply be
| an innovation hub.
|
| That I can think off the top of my head:
|
| - Orbital marine, making tidal turbine
| https://twitter.com/Orbitalmarine
|
| - Their grid https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FXe1hBvlylw
|
| - Their Hydrogen facilities, using extra renewable
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rybpaqhg5Qg
| jacquesm wrote:
| It's a place where a lot of research around this theme is
| conducted.
| [deleted]
| arethuza wrote:
| It's apparently powered by energy from the European Marine
| Energy Centre:
|
| http://www.emec.org.uk/
|
| I suspect there is simply more infrastructure for this kind of
| thing in Orkney that the other islands.
| ashtonkem wrote:
| Depending on the exact shape, sometimes dropping giant bits of
| steel in the ocean can be very good for shipping; we
| purposefully sink ships that are EOL for this exact purpose
| fairly often.
| cmarschner wrote:
| I wonder how you would deal with theft and espionage for an
| underwater data center. The fact that no humans are around could
| be detrimental.
| rhodo wrote:
| it wouldn't be too hard I don't think. It's a sealed tube so
| any attempts to get in could be detected with accelerometers or
| microphones.
| DenisM wrote:
| Attack sharks should easily solve the problem. In fact I heard
| that Steve Balmer himself was seen under the water, frolicking
| among his peers.
| jandrese wrote:
| It's hard to imagine anybody getting in there while it's
| underwater without nation-state level resources. We're talking
| about a sub with a huge moon pool that you park on top of it,
| or a specialized cover that fits over the hatch or something.
| You also have to deal with the pure nitrogen atmosphere inside
| of the data center. All in all it seems a lot harder than
| bribing the guards at a regular data center to look the other
| way while you mess around with some servers.
| rk1987 wrote:
| Wonder if the data center was used for real world traffic?
| jacquesm wrote:
| Why heat the oceans indirectly when you can just place the
| heatsource directly in them? Much less chance of losing precious
| ergs.
|
| Seriously though, what is the direct ecological impact of doing
| this at scale, would the local increase in temperature have an
| immediate effect on the life around it? If so how much of an
| impact?
|
| What about the effect on surface life and life in intermediary
| layers of the water? After all, a body this size radiating 10's
| of KW of heat would cause substantial convection. At data-centre
| scale could it conceivably shut-down ocean currents or re-route
| them?
| ChuckMcM wrote:
| The scale is off. Things that affect local ecosystems are
| cooling multi-gigawatt nuclear reactors with nearby ocean
| water, you would be lucky if one of these drew a megawatt of
| power.
|
| That said, the physics are "heat is heat". If you put it into
| the air or you put it directly into the ocean the only way it
| leaves the planet is by black body radiation. As a result
| locally heating some seawater nearby has (on a global scale)
| the same impact as heating the air the same amount.
|
| Now we know there are some ecosystems in the ocean that prefer
| thermal vents and you might find that around the data center
| itself you have a wider variety of sea life than is found in
| the general vicinity due to different thermal conditions. Not
| sure if you could map out that was a positive or negative
| change.
|
| Generally though, the ecological impact of doing this at scale
| is not going to be different in scale than land data centers.
| nixgeek wrote:
| Sure but one thought experiment is what if we put more of our
| datacenters underwater?
|
| I expect AWS us-east-1 now adds up to over a gigawatt of
| critical load so if submerged in the ocean off Virginia what
| would be the effects, and how would those be different from
| terrestrial datacenters?
| ChuckMcM wrote:
| From a total energy gain/loss it doesn't change anything.
| Heat generated on planet diffuses into the ocean (the
| largest heat sink) and radiates into space at a
| (relatively[1]) fixed rate.
|
| Given the mechanics, the overall ratio of heat in the
| atmosphere vs heat in the oceans is fixed by the Rtheta of
| the atmosphere/ocean boundary. If the atmosphere gets
| warmer, more heat is transferred. If the atmosphere is
| colder less heat is transferred.
|
| The other question (which Jacques alluded too) is what
| about the local conditions. And here to the thermal
| mechanics give our underwater data center an advantage.
| Given the thermal conductivity of water, and seawater in
| particular, heat dumped into any spot _rapidly_ diffuses to
| the rest of the ocean. That is not the case with air, which
| has a much lower thermal conductivity. Dumping lots of heat
| into _unconstrained_ air locally can cause a localized
| "hot spot" which creates an interesting thermal plume and
| localized winds as cooler air around it comes rushing in.
|
| To get a good understanding of just how effective the ocean
| is at diffusing heat, consider any of the hydrogen bomb
| tests in the Pacific. Prodigious amounts of heat dumped
| into the ocean creating a local hot spot (and a lot of
| steam!) and an undetectable change in overall ocean
| temperature. Kilauea volcano, same effect.
|
| The ocean has _a lot_ of thermal mass, without something
| like an asteroid from space, its hard to move the needle on
| its temperature overall.
|
| [1] There are some pretty interesting thoughts around using
| harmonic resonators to convert ambient heat into IR
| radiation at a wavelength that can more easily pass through
| the atmosphere but those are just lab experiments at the
| moment AFAIK.
| jacquesm wrote:
| > The other question (which Jacques alluded too) is what
| about the local conditions. And here to the thermal
| mechanics give our underwater data center an advantage.
| Given the thermal conductivity of water, and seawater in
| particular, heat dumped into any spot rapidly diffuses to
| the rest of the ocean.
|
| Thank you, it is precisely that which I was wondering
| about.
| falcolas wrote:
| > the only way it leaves the planet is by black body
| radiation
|
| But, if you're heating the oceans, you're putting an entire
| other mass (the atmosphere) between yourself and space. So
| you're heating the water, the water is heating the
| atmosphere, and the atmosphere is radiating that into space.
| It's adding a step to the overall cooling process.
| bananabreakfast wrote:
| That's not really how it works. The land and ocean radiate
| their energy directly into space.
|
| This works through emitting mostly infrared frequency light
| for which, just like visible light, the atmosphere is
| mostly transparent.
| falcolas wrote:
| However, water can also transfer heat to the atmosphere
| via conduction, evaporation, etc. I don't know the
| comparative rates, but there is certainly a lot of
| evaporation.
| [deleted]
| rbanffy wrote:
| OTOH, if these are passively cooled, you are not dumping
| the waste heat of the HVAC systems, as well as the power
| user to keep them running.
| golergka wrote:
| I don't have any numbers, but on intuitive level, cooling
| servers with ocean water directly sounds a lot more efficient
| and eco-friendly than burning coal in order to generate
| electricity in order to power AC in order to cool the whole
| giant room full of air and people in order to cool some
| servers.
| greenie_beans wrote:
| I have the same questions about the temperature. Seems like
| that might add some extra heat to an already-warming ocean.
| Especially if this is done at massive scale. I'm not a
| scientist though!
| gorgoiler wrote:
| I feel like this is the logical conclusion of any energy
| conversation.
|
| So what if we make a breakthrough with fusion power? We will
| all die from heat exhaustion caused by the arse end of AC units
| bringing about the heat death of the Earth.
| Etheryte wrote:
| The orders of magnitude are wildly different, even at large
| server farm scale. According to some estimates, capturing
| merely ~0.3% of the available energy from the Gulf Stream would
| be enough to supply all of Florida with electricity [1].
|
| [1]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marine_current_power#Energy_po...
| pbhjpbhj wrote:
| I'm curious as to whether we'll ever have wind/ocean current
| energy capture that's sufficient to disturb things enough to
| cause detrimental (or maybe beneficial) effects.
|
| Supposedly, the recent - apparent - changes in UK climate are
| due to changes in trade winds through global climate change.
| There might be small perturbations that we make that
| inadvertently make for large changes in major wind/current
| systems?
|
| I'd guess someone has tried to model these things.
| RobRivera wrote:
| I'm sorry but this is such a 'goalpost' movement here that
| simply takes away a lot of context. The whole point of doing a
| dc underground is to reduce the hvac energy consumption which
| has a much larger ecological impact in terms of heat generated,
| power usage, potential greenhouse gas usage.
|
| The name of the game here is energy efficiency and
| conservation. Use less power by reducing power distribution
| loss at scale. Want an even greener solution? Make em nuclear
| powered like a giant submarine- that way the power generation
| isn't creating a heavg ecological impact.
|
| I think your posing of these questions genuinely fail to
| appreciate this for what it is, a successful proof of concept
| that will permit a step toward a greener future.
| nexuist wrote:
| I don't think jacquesm is off the mark in asking these
| questions, especially:
|
| > what is the direct ecological impact of doing this at scale
|
| What is the impact on sea creatures if we put these giant
| heated cylinders in their territory? Is there any impact? I
| really doubt we have the answers yet.
|
| > at scale
|
| ...also implies that there will be more than one. So if one
| heat cylinder doesn't do anything, what about 10? 100? 1000?
| 10,000? The cylinder pictured is really quite small, you'd
| need to make a ton of them or drop one mega-cylinder to
| compete with land based centers. And it's not like our
| current data centers are keeping up with computing demand; we
| are building more today and presumably will continue building
| them decades into the future.
|
| So these are extremely important questions. We shouldn't
| dismiss this as a workable idea but we should also keep in
| mind that fucking up the ocean is a far more consequential
| action than fucking up some acres of land.
| mc32 wrote:
| There are hot thermal vents and underwater volcanoes
| throughout the oceans. Creatures adapt. The oceans are
| huge. Yes, if they place them in ecologically fragile
| environments that would be a problem --the solution is put
| them offshore where they don't bother anything.
| falcolas wrote:
| > Creatures adapt.
|
| You're missing half the saying. Creatures adapt, or die.
| Given the recent articles about how species extermination
| is accelerating, it's a valid assumption that as many are
| dying as are adapting.
|
| Not to mention, oceanic currents are propelled by heat.
| Changing that balance (whether by man-made resources or
| natural sources) could change the currents, which would
| impact coastal weather patterns.
|
| https://e360.yale.edu/features/will_climate_change_jam_th
| e_g...
| scrollaway wrote:
| Far more of earth is covered by oceans than by land. Why
| are these questions more relevant when building an
| underwater DC than a ground-level one?
| midev wrote:
| They're not? People have asked these questions for
| decades, hence why they're exploring new options....
| falcolas wrote:
| They're not more relevant, but they _are_ equally
| relevant.
|
| This is adding the ocean as a _new_ layer in the overall
| heat dissipation stack for datacenter computing; it 's
| impacting a whole new ecosystem that it wasn't before.
| Thus, we need to be asking these kinds of questions about
| how this will impact oceanic ecosystems.
| mc32 wrote:
| It is adding... the question is how much compared to
| natural systems that add heat to the oceans already (in
| addition to sunlight, thermal vents, oceanic fissures,
| underwater volcanoes, etc.) is it significant or is it
| insignificant?
| falcolas wrote:
| > is it significant or is it insignificant
|
| Then a study (ideally multiple studies) should be
| commissioned to find this out. We shouldn't just do it
| because we can, and because armchair physicists are
| pretty sure that it's insignificant.
|
| Because, that's what Microsoft (and their partner) did.
| They did it because they could.
|
| Remember when we, as a global society, believed that CFCs
| would have an insignificant impact on the environment? I
| do. Perhaps we should tread a bit more lightly when we're
| already running into species extinction and global
| climate change issues.
| mc32 wrote:
| I doubt these would add more heat than a single new
| volcano does, but I'm all ears. According to research[1]
| tectonic activity adds about 3 cubic km of magma/lava
| each year to the oceans (that's 100 times the annual
| production by mauna loa.)
|
| [1] http://volcano.oregonstate.edu/book/export/html/138
| falcolas wrote:
| This sounds a whole lot like the "global warming couldn't
| possibly be our fault (because: volcanoes) so let's not
| change anything" line of thinking, just applied to oceans
| instead of the atmosphere.
|
| In which case, we'll just end up talking past each other,
| so I'll wish you a good day.
| mc32 wrote:
| This is only heat. Unless it's releasing unbeknownst to
| me greenhouse liquids or gasses, it's not the same
| argument.
| nwienert wrote:
| Sounds like a good ~2050 startup, a company that plugs
| volcanoes to sell green credits for underwater server
| farms ;)
| mc32 wrote:
| Unfortunately for their scheme magma would find a
| weakness in the crust somewhere...
| WJW wrote:
| It's not a poor question, but the phrasing implies that the
| ones constructing this test datacenter have not thought
| about this. Given that the engineers in question have spent
| many months designing and constructing this device, it's
| extremely unlikely that some random commentor on HN (even
| one with interests as varied as Jacques) is going to have
| questions that have not come up yet.
|
| Asking the questions here on HN instead of in a place where
| the designers are likely to read them makes it seem it's
| more of a karma grab than a reasonable "I have concerns"
| type situation that he really wants to do something about.
| Nor are random HN commenters very likely to have big, fact-
| backed contributions btw. It's just alarmism under the
| pretense of innocently asking questions.
| jacquesm wrote:
| I don't go around chasing the scientists that have put
| this together because they likely have better things to
| do with their time.
|
| I have no assumptions either way, and if they do happen
| to frequent HN the chances are actually better to get
| such questions answered here than anywhere else.
|
| Karma grab? FWIW I offered to hand back in all my karma
| points because they are utterly meaningless but Dang
| wouldn't have it so please spare me the nonsense
| accusations.
|
| HN was still free to write to, contribute and ask
| questions of last I checked, I don't need you - nor
| anybody else - to tell me what I can or can not do here,
| nor do I need you to try to put me in a negative light
| for trying to understand something better.
|
| FWIW humanity has an extremely well developed skill
| called problem solving. We can do just about anything in
| the laboratory. But when scaling up those laboratory
| experiments we often find out that what we thought was a
| neg positive ends up being a net negative. Before we sink
| a few 10's of thousands of data centers onto the
| continental shelf I'd like to know the ecological impact,
| _even if that has already been studied_ (which I 'm
| actually not aware of).
|
| See also: plastic, freon, lead (in gasoline) and a whole
| raft of other things that seemed like a great idea at the
| time but for which we did not have the long term
| predictions when they mattered most: at the beginning,
| mostly because people did not ask the right questions.
|
| Scientists in the beginning of the previous century:
| "Plastics, they last for ever! yay!" and a hundred years
| later "Plastics, they last for ever! Oops!".
|
| Anyway, the steady stream of quality answers in this
| thread proves you more wrong than I ever will but this
| comment reflects poorly on HN, me, and ultimately, on
| you.
| kamel3d wrote:
| Well you could ask same question about lava floating from
| volcanos to oceans, that much hotter and would have greater
| impact, or if the sun light would have an ecological impact on
| the water because it heat it everyday! I don't know what would
| few degrees increase in temperature around the capsules would
| do to the environment, keeping in mind that water is changing
| all the time due to sea current also that temperature is very
| local I mean it does not extend more than few inches in the
| water, if you have any knowledge about thermodynamics you would
| know that the temperature of two bodies should reach an
| equilibrium and since the ocean is much bigger the effect of
| the temperature coming from the data centres is negligible, but
| all this was an experiment and I am sure the ecological factor
| was taken in account, but still your question was kinda stupid!
| bilater wrote:
| Also keep in mind the majority of ocean life is close to the
| surface so this is also inherently less harmful than a sea side
| factory dumping heat and waste into the ocean.
| slaymaker1907 wrote:
| From what I remember, the impact was pretty minimal. Water has
| a huge capacity for heat so the temperature was elevated only
| when very close to the data center.
| reaperducer wrote:
| _the impact was pretty minimal_
|
| We used to say that about plastics in the ocean. And
| landfills. And light pollution. And noise pollution. And
| space junk. And on and on and on.
|
| Heck, not that many decades ago there were responsible people
| who thought that air pollution was no big deal because
| there's plenty of air, and it's just fine if California
| allows rich car collectors to keep buying leaded gasoline
| long after other states outlawed it. The impact is "minimal."
| revax wrote:
| This is basic thermodynamics stuff. Looks like energy used
| in datacenter in 2018 was around 200TWh. If you use all
| this energy to heat only the mediterranean sea, you will
| have a change of temperature of 0.00006degC.
|
| I used this calculator
| https://www.omnicalculator.com/physics/specific-heat
| tedsanders wrote:
| FYI, your comment is wildly misleading. Thermal pollution
| is real and has a wide research literature.
|
| The worry is not that that the average temperature of the
| oceans will rise. The worry is that the local temperature
| of the ocean will rise. This is exactly what happens with
| other forms of thermal pollution. One example studied for
| decades was California's San Onofre nuclear power
| generating station. It has been subject to regulations
| regarding its thermal pollution into the ocean. They
| built long pipes so that the temperature increase from
| the cooling water could heat the ocean gradually over a
| wide area rather than severely in a narrow area. It's the
| same principle as a CPU heatsink.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermal_pollution
|
| https://authors.library.caltech.edu/26008/
|
| https://www.worldcat.org/title/ecological-effects-of-
| thermal...
|
| For what it's worth, I personally found your comment
| quite distasteful. Instead of trying to understand what
| you didn't know, you knocked down a straw man and
| pretended like it was obvious and backed by science.
| revax wrote:
| Thank you for your insightful comments, I stand
| corrected. I didn't think of the local effects.
| golergka wrote:
| This is a non-argument, because it can be used on literally
| anything, up to lighting one match.
| closeparen wrote:
| The impact of cooling a building on the surface is
| definitely higher.
| tbabb wrote:
| This reads like you have not done any calculation to
| determine whether the entire ocean can be heated by any
| plausible number of datacenters or not.
| [deleted]
| reaperducer wrote:
| What does it matter if the entire ocean is heated? Power
| plants aren't allowed to dump unlimited quantities of hot
| water into the ocean. Why is it OK for a data center?
| emteycz wrote:
| There is a difference between understanding of different
| fields of science. We understand temperature in large
| bodies pretty well - and we know that it's nearly
| impossible to sink that many servers to do anything.
| ants_a wrote:
| I once read that using ZFS was supposed to boil the
| oceans.
| emteycz wrote:
| People tend to overestimate and also like to use
| hyperboles
| tgragnato wrote:
| Yeah, it's a theoretical limit. You don't need to boil
| any ocean to use ZFS.
|
| Reference: >>>
|
| If 64 bits isn't enough, the next logical step is 128
| bits. That's enough to survive Moore's Law until I'm
| dead, and after that, it's not my problem. But it does
| raise the question: what are the theoretical limits to
| storage capacity?
|
| Although we'd all like Moore's Law to continue forever,
| quantum mechanics imposes some fundamental limits on the
| computation rate and information capacity of any physical
| device. In particular, it has been shown that 1 kilogram
| of matter confined to 1 liter of space can perform at
| most 1051 operations per second on at most 1031 bits of
| information [see Seth Lloyd, "Ultimate physical limits to
| computation." Nature 406, 1047-1054 (2000)]. A fully-
| populated 128-bit storage pool would contain 2128 blocks
| = 2137 bytes = 2140 bits; therefore the minimum mass
| required to hold the bits would be (2140 bits) / (1031
| bits/kg) = 136 billion kg.
|
| That's a lot of gear.
|
| To operate at the 1031 bits/kg limit, however, the entire
| mass of the computer must be in the form of pure energy.
| By E=mc2, the rest energy of 136 billion kg is 1.2x1028
| J. The mass of the oceans is about 1.4x1021 kg. It takes
| about 4,000 J to raise the temperature of 1 kg of water
| by 1 degree Celcius, and thus about 400,000 J to heat 1
| kg of water from freezing to boiling. The latent heat of
| vaporization adds another 2 million J/kg. Thus the energy
| required to boil the oceans is about 2.4x106 J/kg \\*
| 1.4x1021 kg = 3.4x1027 J. Thus, fully populating a
| 128-bit storage pool would, literally, require more
| energy than boiling the oceans.
| legohead wrote:
| if humans output the entirety of their energy usage into
| the ocean, it would take ~8000 years to raise the
| temperature by 1 degree.
| snovv_crash wrote:
| Nothing exists in a vacuum. Of course comparing having a
| datacentre to not having a datacentre shows that having it
| has higher ecological impact.
|
| But that wasn't really the option now, was it?
| rbanffy wrote:
| > a body this size radiating 10's of KW of heat
|
| It's kind of literally a drop in the ocean, but I assume it'd
| be worth doing a bit of research about local disruptions if we
| intend to drop large deployments in shallow waters.
|
| To shut down or significantly disturb ocean currents, we'd need
| _a lot_ of these things.
| ericmay wrote:
| Another question to ask is what the effect of pumping these
| data centers full of cold air is, and how the excess heat from
| that may be affecting the atmosphere.
|
| Not to discredit your point or anything, it's a very good one.
| I think we just also have to answer it in conjunction with what
| we are currently doing. Maybe we can sink some data centers and
| have little to no impact while also realizing energy and cost
| savings?
| Wowfunhappy wrote:
| Slightly off-topic, but this is how I feel when people
| discuss the risks of nuclear power. You can talk all you want
| about the disasterous consequences of a reactor meltdown, but
| what about the disastrous consequences of sticking with
| fossil fuels?
|
| I agree that switching to wind and solar would be better, but
| it's not obvious whether we _can_ switch without transforming
| the world economy in ways people seem unwilling to do.
| Nuclear reactors can generate much more energy, and I really
| think it's time to get behind them.
| gzu wrote:
| We need underwater, seaborne, or subsurface nuclear power
| plants.
|
| Radiation release is contained to within the largest
| stratum available on the Earth: ocean and rock. Anything
| avoiding our thin atmosphere is a win.
| numpad0 wrote:
| We need NPT dropped, that's all it takes I think(given
| everyone can still be nice after which is a big if)
| cedex12 wrote:
| the "non-proliferation treaty" ?
| numpad0 wrote:
| Yes, nuclear isn't hard, they're so strictly regulated
| because there aren't other dual use technology that are
| more controllable, destructive and easily repurposed by
| sufficiently advanced nations.
|
| My personal opinion is that if we discover a more
| devastating weapon of some sort, such as kinetic
| bombardment using bunches of O'Neill space colonies as
| projectiles, nuclear becomes comparatively benign and
| that kinds of event can lead to more de-regulation.
| kempbellt wrote:
| >what is the direct ecological impact of doing this at scale
|
| Great question. Without real data it's hard to know for sure. I
| do think that it would be somewhat negligible though.
|
| Considering we have heat vents and underwater volcanoes in the
| ocean that kick out insane amounts of heat, I can't see
| datacenters having a ton of impact. Will it affect the
| immediate vicinity, probably. Will it affect the ocean at
| large, I doubt it. Unless we start sinking exaflops of CPU
| power into the ocean, I wouldn't worry too much.
| NathanKP wrote:
| An HVAC system above ground would generate far more heat. The
| advantage of sinking the data center would appear to be that it
| can function with passive cooling from the surrounding water
| only, no HVAC. This means less electricity consumption (meaning
| less energy generation required, and fewer resulting greenhouse
| gasses). And HVAC systems create far more waste heat than they
| do cooling, so this passive cooling will just be moving the
| source heat to the water, not dumping extra waste heat as well.
|
| Overall an underwater data center should generate far less heat
| overall than an aboveground one.
| shawkinaw wrote:
| > And HVAC systems create far more waste heat than they do
| cooling, so this passive cooling will just be moving the
| source heat to the water, not dumping extra waste heat as
| well.
|
| Where do you get that idea? A typical EER 12 air conditioner
| will move 3.5x the heat energy that it consumes (COP = 3.5)
| [0].
|
| [0] https://www.engineeringtoolbox.com/cop-eer-d_409.html
| mlyle wrote:
| Another way to put this is it puts 130% of the source heat
| out into the environment.
| gpm wrote:
| No, it's way worse than that.
|
| At the location of the hvac it puts 130% of the source
| heat into the environment.
|
| But 30% of that heat put into the environment came from
| electricity generated in a power plant. Power plants are
| typically less than 50% efficient, so it put's out as
| much heat into the environment at the source of the
| electricity. Bumping the value to 160% (130% + 30%).
|
| However waste heat is a small fraction of the heating
| that electricity generation produces. Very roughly 10
| times as much heat is trapped via the CO2 released than
| heat is released by the power plant. Bumping that value
| up to 460% (160% + 30% * 10).
|
| I.e. 4.6 units of heat are put into the environment for
| every unit of heat removed from a closed system.
|
| (Obviously the details of this depend dramatically on the
| environment. Heat pump efficiency depends on the degree
| of temperature gradient, CO2 release and power plant
| efficiency depends dramatically on where the power is
| coming from, which changes with where you are located.)
| mlyle wrote:
| Fair points. IMO, the 460% metric is a bit of a wacky
| number, though, because of not counting the carbon and
| efficiency involved in the original 100%. Assuming the
| 100% comes from the same power source, it's still only
| 25-30% "worse".
|
| Also I think you're a bit pessimistic about modern power
| plant efficiency-- combined cycle plants do better than
| 50%, and that's before we're considering any benefit from
| renewables.
| gpm wrote:
| > Assuming the 100% comes from the same power source,
| it's still only 25-30% "worse".
|
| Fair point, I guess my argument makes more sense if we
| were discussing moving naturally occurring heat out (i.e.
| household ac) than with respect to cooling a datacenter.
|
| Nitpicking the numbers used in the estimate... is
| probably not worth it. Every bit of it is a very rough
| order of magnitude number. If you're somewhere with 95%
| renewable energy it should be an order of magnitude
| better, if you're somewhere where energy production is
| dominated by an inefficient coal plant it should be an
| order of magnitude worse.
| pavanky wrote:
| Isnt this assuming coal / gas powerplants ?
|
| Wouldnt solar / Wind have a smaller CO2 foot print and
| hydro electric be more efficient ?
| eloff wrote:
| I don't see the contradiction. The heat it moves plus the
| heat generated through inefficiency. It's always > heat
| moved.
| shawkinaw wrote:
| I guess it depends what you mean by "waste heat". I
| consider the waste heat as the "extra" heat/energy on top
| of the heat moved. But even if you consider _all_ the
| heat as waste heat, calling 30% more "far" more seems
| like an exaggeration.
| MrGilbert wrote:
| Depends on the reference. If the underwater datacenter
| produces only e.g. 3% atop, 30% is still "far more".
|
| But without scientific sources, these are only wild
| speculations.
| JeremyNT wrote:
| Really, you have to isolate the variable you care about
| here, which is 'how much energy is spent on cooling.'
|
| Consider, if you can achieve a fully passive cooling
| solution by dropping a datacenter into a lake, you've
| reduced the energy consumption in service of cooling by
| 100%.
|
| (In reality, water cooling isn't "free," but I'm willing to
| bet the amount of energy required to dump heat into
| surrounding water is a whole lot less than the amount of
| energy spent for the compression cycles and forced air of
| above-ground HVAC systems. Water cooling using direct
| application of chilled water is already a thing, using
| lakes or retention ponds as places to dump heat; what being
| at the bottom of a lake gives you is a more consistent and
| proximate source of cool water than you might expect from a
| current chilled water distribution system)
| NathanKP wrote:
| It's not just the HVAC system itself, it is the supply
| chain to operate the HVAC as well. There is waste heat from
| the power transmission system to get power to the HVAC
| unit, waste heat from the power plant that produced the
| power, waste heat from the transport of raw materials to
| the power plant, increased global warming heat from the CO2
| that the power plant produces while burning those raw
| materials, etc.
|
| Obviously this can be mitigated if you are able to get
| renewable power from a nearby source like a geothermal
| plant, hydroelectric, or solar. But if you are using fossil
| fuel power from a long distance away, that means any unit
| of heat moved by an HVAC involved many units of heat
| production to ultimately move that unit of heat.
| abfan1127 wrote:
| For every 3.5 BTU moved, it consumes 1 BTU. That BTU goes
| somewhere. Heat in the inductor coils soaks into the
| environment, etc.
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| saying 'at scale' is being unclear, because it seems to be
| implying that we should consider what would happen if we put
| every data center today underwater in the same spot, which is
| what no one is thinking of doing...
| Shivetya wrote:
| Well they why not create artificial bodies of water and just
| keep our data centers there? How much water is sufficient for
| the cooling cycle to not require additional energy? How much
| water will need to be added to such pools to deal with
| evaporation?
|
| I think on a smaller scale test with an artificial pool would
| provide some solid answers. We could even put solar panels
| across the surface to limit wind and solar evaporation
| effects
| lawlessone wrote:
| You'd have to pump loads of water for it then? to fill the
| pool and replace what is lost to evaporation.
|
| "I think on a smaller scale test with an artificial pool
| would provide some solid answers. We could even put solar
| panels across the surface to limit wind and solar
| evaporation effects "
|
| If it's artificial pool you'd need evaporation to cool it.
| Godel_unicode wrote:
| Do you not consider lake Powell to be an artificial body
| of water?
| lawlessone wrote:
| never heard of it until now
| PopeDotNinja wrote:
| You could have a solar powered HVAC system that captures the
| condensed water, and then submerge the thing you're trying to
| cool in that water!
|
| P.S. am not HVAC wizard.
| bhhaskin wrote:
| The issue is the HVAC system itself creates a lot of heat.
| It normally doesn't matter in a traditional system as the
| heat is generated out side the areas being cooled.
| StavrosK wrote:
| The issue is CO2, though, not heat per se. Yes, the two are
| correlated, but if you use renewables to power your things,
| it doesn't really matter how much heat you generate.
|
| Please correct me if I'm wrong.
| chriswarbo wrote:
| You're right that renewably-generated waste heat isn't a
| big deal all-else-being-equal; but all else usually _isn
| 't_ equal, and climate change is a always question of
| numbers (my favourite example: extracting a barrel of oil
| from the air/flue using renewable energy and sequestering
| it long-term, compared to the cost of leaving a barrel's
| worth of oil where it is in the ground; the latter is free,
| except for opportunity cost)
| StavrosK wrote:
| Hmm, wait, why isn't the first one free in terms of CO2?
| outworlder wrote:
| > but if you use renewables to power your things, it
| doesn't really matter how much heat you generate.
|
| Thermodynamics should really be emphasized in schools. You
| are getting some amazing responses that are completely
| ignoring the fact that our renewable energy solutions are
| not increasing the overall heat in our planet. They are
| just moving energy around.
|
| The only thing that really matters is how are the emissions
| going to look like when we are manufacturing renewable
| energy equipment (either new capacity or replacing faulty
| ones).
| jacquesm wrote:
| That's faulty. Solar installations change the albedo of
| the planet. That's not a problem if the fraction is a
| very small one and it is spread out. But if it is
| concentrated or relatively large it certainly could have
| an effect.
| outworlder wrote:
| > Solar installations change the albedo of the planet
|
| They do. And so does every single thing we build that's
| exposed to the outside - bulding, cars, even you when you
| are out and about.
|
| The effect is minuscule unless we are turning the planet
| into Coruscant or this is a gray goo scenario.
| pbhjpbhj wrote:
| >The effect is miniscule //
|
| The effect of a human on the planet is miniscule, but
| we're still in the bad state we are.
|
| We're looking at covering the planet in solar panels,
| worth considering how the albedo changes will effect
| things on a planetary scale.
| jacquesm wrote:
| We thought much the same when we introduced the
| automobile. Plastic for packaging purposes. Freon to help
| with the Carnot cycle in refrigerators. These things
| don't matter when you do them once or twice. But when you
| start doing them on an industrial scale it changes the
| equation from 'no effect' to 'unknown effect'. And
| unknown effect might be anything from negligible to
| planet wide catastrophe. It would be nice to know where
| we land before taking off.
|
| Oceans warming up is a big thing, and local effects can
| be substantial even if global average change is
| negligible.
| StavrosK wrote:
| Isn't increasing the albedo cooling the planet down?
| jacquesm wrote:
| Yes, an increase in reflectivity would cool the planet
| down. But solar panels actually absorb a lot more than
| they reflect (they would have to). The ideal solar panel
| would be utterly black.
| StavrosK wrote:
| Ah, yes, that makes sense. The reflective cover they have
| made me think they reflected more than they absorbed
| (which, yes, doesn't make sense).
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _it doesn 't really matter how much heat you generate_
|
| _Doesn't matter_ is strong. It won't in the short term.
| But as we continue increasing our energy use as a species,
| the simple thermal problem of waste-heat management will
| certainly surface.
| StavrosK wrote:
| Sure, where "doesn't matter" read "is way way less
| important than CO2 emissions".
| mlyle wrote:
| If you use renewables, you're using heat that is already
| around on the planet. As long as you don't change
| planetary albedo, equilibrium temperature is the same.
|
| Of course, heating water locally, etc, can cause its own
| environmental impacts.
| gowld wrote:
| "Renewable" refers to energy, not just heat. The sun's
| energy is be used for other purposes than heat,
| thankfully.
|
| Growing a 100 trees and chopping them into lumber is less
| hot than growing 100 trees and burning them.
|
| If all the sun's energy were converted to heat (and not
| radiated away), we'd be in big trouble. That's what
| "carbon" pollution is all about -- Carbon dioxide is a
| greenhouse gas that traps heat. Reducing albedo is one
| way to increase tempterature, but directly burning stuff
| is another way.
| mlyle wrote:
| I think you missed the point of what I said. When we're
| talking about powering data centers with renewables,
| talking about sequestering carbon via lumber is rather
| orthogonal.
|
| The point was, coarsely: using e.g. solar panels only
| changes the Earth's surface temperature to the extent it
| changes albedo. (Ignoring second-order effects of
| concentrating heat and associated effects on radiation,
| etc.)
| gpm wrote:
| This depends on the renewable.
|
| Hydro, wind and waves are probably at that ideal except
| to the extent that they are tidal energy.
|
| Solar panels... are literally in the business of making
| the planetary albedo higher, to the extent that they do
| so they are introducing thermal energy.
|
| Geothermal is in the business of increasing the rate at
| which heat escapes from underneath the surface, which
| increases surface temperature.
|
| Tidal energy is in the business of extracting energy from
| the kinetic energy of the moon, which probably increases
| the temperature of earth (but it's hard to say to what
| degree).
|
| Fusion (if it ever becomes practical, and you count is as
| renewable) is in the business of releasing potential
| energy trapped in hydrogen atoms, increasing the
| temperature. This is particularly problematic because
| fusion would also enable us to increase our energy usage
| to the point that direct heating becomes a problem at the
| same scale as CO2 release currently is.
|
| Fission (if you count it) is like fusion.
|
| Space based solar (if it ever becomes practical), is
| increasing the area of the sun captured instead of the
| albedo, and is directly introducing energy.
|
| Etc
| bluGill wrote:
| Not necessarily - if (I think this is true but am not
| able to prove it) the earth is on a slight negative
| carbon slope, and renewables reduce that slope we are
| still making an impact on long term temperature.
| ithkuil wrote:
| this! another way to look at it: your solar panels are
| temporarily "stealing" heat generated by sun rays hitting
| a surface of equivalent color. When you use electricity
| to do some work, it will be turned back to heat. so if
| you want to be 100% "heat neutral", all you have to do is
| to ensure that for every square meter of solar panels you
| also paint an proportionate area with a color that
| reflects the right amount of sunlight to compensate the
| difference between the color of the solar panel and the
| area that was there before you installed the solar panel.
|
| If you think that's silly (and rightfully so), then
| perhaps that can sharpen your intuition on how
| insignificant is the total amount of heat produced by our
| devices (even if cumulatively they are a big looking
| number); the total amount of radiation that comes from
| the sun down to earth is staggering.
| fellowmartian wrote:
| Actually, in the long-term, waste-heat management is _the
| only_ problem. Every other problem can be geo-engineered
| away, but we could never geo-engineer away
| thermodynamics.
| thefifthsetpin wrote:
| When you say "short term," how long are you talking
| about?
| Retric wrote:
| The similarly extreme version is kind of an interesting
| comparison, and similarly irrelevant.
|
| The 84,000 ppm for 60 minutes is roughly the lethal CO2
| concentration. Local CO2 concentration is often several
| times atmospheric CO2 levels. That's clearly addressable
| but I suspect around 8,000 ppm atmospheric we would start
| to see deaths from this which is achievable from coal
| deposits. Reaching a fully lethal atmosphere is of course
| much harder.
|
| So, I think you're right temperature pollution at extreme
| levels is worse.
| trebel wrote:
| Also consider cost (in terms of CO2, resource consumption,
| etc) of building and maintaining the renewable energy
| sources.
|
| I don't know how this would compare between underwater
| datacenter, solar panels, wind.
| StavrosK wrote:
| Building and maintaining the non-renewable energy sources
| also costs CO2, though.
| uluyol wrote:
| I think the question is what is the _local_ impact of the
| temperature increase? It would be good to know if it harms
| certain types of ecosystems ahead of time rather than after
| the fact.
|
| It's also possible that a direct increase in ocean
| temperature has undesirable knock-on effects that don't take
| place if you operate on land.
| kamel3d wrote:
| Well this was all an experiment itself and I am sure the
| ecological factor is being taken in consideration
| bearjaws wrote:
| I believe it would be less impactful than many power plants
| that vent their heat into the ocean. There are many
| studies, mainly around marine life (phytoplankton,
| manatees, other endangered species). These systems probably
| produce similar heat output into the water.
|
| https://assets.nrdc.org/sites/default/files/power-plant-
| cool...
|
| https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0025
| 3...
|
| https://res.mdpi.com/d_attachment/water/water-11-02577/arti
| c...
| mc32 wrote:
| I guess the impact would be much less than that from underwater
| volcanoes and fissure vents that exist already.
| csomar wrote:
| There is (or was) around a million submarine volcanoes in the
| ocean according the wikipedia. There are also hydrothermal
| vents across all of the oceans. The amount of energy to affect
| the ocean should be colossal (though I didn't do the math). To
| put it into perspective, we have been pumping crude oil and
| greenhouse emissions for over a 100 years by billions of people
| to raise temperatures by a degree or so.
| fblp wrote:
| Ocean water is already used to cool nuclear and coal power
| plants. I suspect these would radiate far more heat than a data
| centre.
|
| I'm surprised msft wouldn't propose to pipe the ocean water in
| like these power plants before going through the challenge of
| building under the ocean...
| zamadatix wrote:
| I think they were trying to see if you could get away with 0
| power/cooling infrastructure and how well it'd work if you
| could. Pumping vast amounts of water may be better than
| running a vast amount of active cooling but neither is as 0
| as dumping it in the water and seeing what happens.
| teknopaul wrote:
| I suspect one of Bill Gate's plans is to defend data against
| solar flares. Deeper the better.
| serjester wrote:
| It takes about 80 watts to heat up a liter of water 1deg
| celsius. Global data centers used about 4.16 x 10^14 watts last
| year [1]. Let's assume we still have a lot more data centers to
| build so bump that number up 10,000X. Assuming every watt of
| energy is actually converted to heat and we moved every data
| center on earth underwater it'd raise the temperate of the
| oceans (1.3x 10^21 liters) about 0.01degC.
|
| This is a very rough calculation and there's obviously nuances
| but the point is oceans are HUGE and water has a high specific
| heat. It's much easier to indirectly heat them with greenhouses
| gases.
|
| Edit: I clearly need to brush up on my physics. Regardless the
| effect is still miniscule.
|
| [1]
| https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbestechcouncil/2017/12/15/wh...
| xiaopanga wrote:
| Let's fix the math.
|
| Amount of energy consumed from global data centers: 205
| terawatt-hours. [0]
|
| Amount of water in the oceans: 1,386,000,000 (km3)~=
| 1.386*10^21kg[1]
|
| water has a specific heat capacity of: 4,200 J/kgdegC [2]
|
| Energy/HeatCapacity/AmountOfWater = 1.268x10^-7 degrees
| Celsius
|
| [0]: https://energyinnovation.org/2020/03/17/how-much-energy-
| do-d... [1]: https://www.usgs.gov/special-topic/water-
| science-school/scie... [2]:
| https://www.bbc.co.uk/bitesize/guides/z2gjtv4/revision/5
| kwhitefoot wrote:
| > every watt of energy
|
| Watt is a measure of power not energy. Did you mean Watt-
| hour? The specific heat of water is about 4.2 kJ/kg/K. One
| joule is one watt for one second, that is 1 J = 1 W.s. So one
| W for one hour (3600 seconds) is 3.6 kJ and is enough to
| raise the temperature of a kg of water by about 0.9 K
|
| You need to brush up on dimensional analysis :-)
| t0mbstone wrote:
| You are making the assumption that moving data centers
| underwater would also come along with a 10,000-fold increase
| in the number of data centers? That seems like an
| unnecessarily hyperbolic approach.
|
| That would mean going from 8.4 million data centers to 840
| billion data centers. I mean, come on...
|
| But hey, let's roll with it. What would be the effect on the
| environment if we literally had 10,000 times more data
| centers ABOVE ground, for comparison? After all, you are
| neglecting to take into account the fact that a HUGE amount
| of the wattage used by existing data centers has been cooling
| via HVAC, and by switching to underwater cooling their
| overall watt usage would theoretically drop a good bit due to
| the efficiency gains.
| aaronbee wrote:
| I believe the GP's point is that _even with_ a 10,000x
| increase in data center energy consumption, the effect on
| ocean temperature is tiny.
| luma wrote:
| Sounds like they're just using pessimistic numbers to make
| the point. Even if you multiply the existing datacenter
| footprint by 4 orders of magnitude, it still only results
| in a 0.01C raise in temperature.
| CDSlice wrote:
| I think you are arguing for the same thing your parent
| comment is? That comment is trying to show that even in the
| absolute worst case of no efficiency gains and 10,000x
| increase in data centers the impact that using the oceans
| to cool them would have on the ocean is absolutely
| minuscule.
| mlyle wrote:
| Conflating power and energy, and not considering the amount
| of heat that would be dissipated away, completely destroy any
| meaning this math would have.
| jimktrains2 wrote:
| That assumes heat is distributed instantaneously, which it is
| not. There will definitely be local affects. The question is
| if those will harm or collapse native habitats.
| jerf wrote:
| There's quite a lot of ocean that doesn't hardly have a
| "native habitat". Most ocean doesn't look like a coral
| reef, most ocean looks like water sitting on top of dirt.
|
| Unfortunately, the living parts of oceans are also the
| parts that tend to be easy to get to, and putting stuff
| farther away will be more expensive. But careful placement
| may be able to mitigate that.
|
| It is still ultimately a 3D environment where the vast,
| _vast_ bulk of the 3D environment is not thriving with
| heat-sensitive life. Our 2D surface intuition misleads us
| here. Our mental images of the ocean are of the exceptional
| locations, not the common ones.
| gowld wrote:
| Our 2D intuition leads back on track though, since 2D (or
| really 1D, or whatever fractal dumention represents
| thecoastliine) is almost certainly where data centers
| will get built, not on the middle of the pacific.
| mrfredward wrote:
| >It takes about 80 watts to heat up a liter of water 1deg
| celsius
|
| You're confusing power and energy here.
| TheNorthman wrote:
| The formula for calculating this is: Q = c_p * d * V *
| (DT). Assuming an isobaric specific heat capacity of 4.18
| J/(g K) and a density of 1.00 g/cm^3, heating a liter of
| water 1.00 K would take 4.18 kJ.
|
| Giving OP's number for the volume of water in the ocean,
| heating the ocean 0.01 K would be 5.4 * 10^22 J. Assuming
| 365 days in a year, that's 1.7 * 10^15 W, an order of
| magnitude less than OPs figure for datacenter power-usage.
| qes wrote:
| > an order of magnitude less than OPs figure for
| datacenter power-usage
|
| You mean the figure that OP first increased by 4 orders
| of magnitude, right?
| vidarh wrote:
| > It takes about 80 watts to heat up a liter of water 1deg
| celsius.
|
| 1 calorie is by definition the energy requires to heat 1 gram
| of water 1degC. In practice 1ml.
|
| So ~1kcal to heat 1 liter of water 1degC
|
| 1 kcal is ~1.163 watt-hours.
| bfieidhbrjr wrote:
| good bot
| outworlder wrote:
| > Assuming every watt of energy is actually converted to heat
| and we moved every data center on earth underwater it'd raise
| the temperate of the oceans (1.3x 10^21 liters) about
| 0.01degC.
|
| Also assuming we have coated the oceans with a perfect
| thermal insulator. Otherwise this heat would also radiate
| away, a small fraction going to the atmosphere and a lot of
| it back into space.
| whiw wrote:
| This seems to confuse Power with Energy. Watts measure Power,
| which is a rate of Energy.
|
| The specific heat of water is 4182 Joules/kg and its density
| is close to 1kg/litre, so 4.128 kJ (Energy) will be required
| to heat 1 litre of water by 1 degree C.
|
| The temperature rise of the oceans will be complicated to
| work out. Taking the OPs figures, 4.16x10^14 watts /
| 1.3x10^21 litres gives 3.2x10^-7 watts per litre of ocean, ie
| 0.32 microJoules of energy added to the oceans every second.
| The temperature rise of the oceans will depend on how quickly
| it can dissipate this heat. What are relevant the heat loss
| mechanisms? Evaporation just moves the problem to the
| atmosphere. Conduction just moves it elsewhere on earth.
| Radiation will shift some of it to space (and some reflected
| back to the earth), but radiation is a property of the
| surface of the ocean, not of the bulk.
| whiw wrote:
| To clarify: 0.32 microJoules of energy are added to every 1
| litre of the ocean every second.
| FpUser wrote:
| "It takes about 80 watts" - Watt is a measure of power, you
| need energy instead (Joules / Watt hours / etc )
| kzrdude wrote:
| In the final product, you could build the data center underwater
| in-place, and have the servers partially accessible - they only
| need to be connected to the structure in one end, and can be
| surrounded by water on all other sides. (Visual idea - the data
| center parts are like fingers on the main structure).
| jacquesm wrote:
| Any seal in that construct would be a single-point-of-failure
| for the whole, not just one fraction.
| datameta wrote:
| I would imagine bulkheads can mitigate some unforeseen leak.
| They can also be built in relatively shallow water without a
| substantial amount of water pressure.
| jerrysievert wrote:
| and if there are any salmon in the area, any sea lion could
| also be quite dangerous to the whole.
| [deleted]
| jeffrallen wrote:
| Right, just fine until there's a massive data leak and a slick of
| SSNs is spreading towards the shore, and then what will the
| Greens say?
| benryon wrote:
| Original Microsoft story: https://news.microsoft.com/innovation-
| stories/project-natick...
| gregd wrote:
| 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.
| slrainka wrote:
| If an underwater Datacenter is established in International
| waters, do any of the data and privacy laws apply?
| jarito wrote:
| Yes. Many of the privacy and data protections are not based on
| where the data is stored, but rather where the people who
| provided that data reside. For example, GDPR (an EU regulation)
| applies to US companies with data in the US, but only if the
| data they are storing belongs to EU customers.
| doctor_eval wrote:
| Really gives a new meaning to the term "data lake"
| 24gttghh wrote:
| 5 years planned with no maintenance (e.g. no storage disk
| failures to replace). I wonder how many spare drives were slapped
| in that tube to make that feasible?
| maxander wrote:
| I would bet they just used SSDs and made sure that the workload
| they were giving these servers wouldn't tend to hit the rewrite
| limit over that time period. (Even then, I'd bet the expected
| writes-per-time was the source of the "five year" figure.)
| jandrese wrote:
| Probably a decent number of warm spares in the mix as well.
| 24gttghh wrote:
| Yeah. I can't see just using the MTBF for the drives and
| not having any spares. Shit happens.
| StillBored wrote:
| In none of the articles do I see the power consumption of the
| pod..
|
| But it looks packed with a lot of servers, and the surface area
| is quite minimal given there don't appear to be any cooling
| fins/etc.
|
| So, that many servers are definitely many KW of power, and its
| all being conducted away via what appears to be a fairly minimal
| surface area. So the problem probably isn't the exterior so much
| as the interior which appears to mostly be a air->paint
| interface.
|
| So, whats the cooling mechanism here, or are the servers that low
| power?
| petascale wrote:
| 240 kW according to Microsoft:
| https://natick.research.microsoft.com/
|
| > [They] adapted a heat-exchange process commonly used for
| cooling submarines to the underwater datacenter. The system
| pipes seawater directly through the radiators on the back of
| each of the 12 server racks and back out into the ocean.
|
| https://news.microsoft.com/features/under-the-sea-microsoft-...
|
| So watercooling with seawater, a pump or two, perhaps a heat
| exchanger (the radiator) is involved. Server to air to pod
| outer surface would be way too inefficient to keep the servers
| operating.
| quickthrowman wrote:
| I was wondering the same thing, since it's submerged I'm
| assuming they use seawater running through chillers to cool
| down the servers?
| maxerickson wrote:
| There's probably an internal heat exchanger that they pump
| seawater through. This article says they pump seawater through
| heat exchangers on each rack (and presumably shows the piping):
|
| https://news.microsoft.com/features/under-the-sea-microsoft-...
| msandford wrote:
| Seems kind of strange to put the whole thing underwater if
| they're going to pump seawater through internal heat
| exchangers. At that point there's not a lot of difference
| between putting the "submarine" underwater and leaving it out
| of -- but near to -- the water and pumping seawater through
| the same exchangers. With the added benefit of people being
| able to access things if something goes wrong.
| Hnrobert42 wrote:
| (Just speculating)
|
| - there are issues with using water for heat exchange and
| that affecting flora/fauna. maybe the impact can be spread
| out more at the bottom of the ocean than for on shore
| locations
|
| - pumping water all the way on to land and back out can
| take a lot of energy (water is heavy)
|
| - coastal land is generally expensive, certainly more than
| seafloor which is free(?)
|
| - coastal land is subject to storm surge in a way that deep
| seafloor is not
| maxerickson wrote:
| Their public statements so far indicate that, on the
| prototype, essentially nothing went wrong in a couple of
| years (a small number of board failures).
|
| On the seafloor, they get constant low temperature water
| with ~0 external pipe and no head to pump against, so it
| might not obviously be better to have access.
| remarkEon wrote:
| What's different about the hardware that they're seeing
| failure rates that low?
| jalk wrote:
| They speculate that the removed oxygen (replaced with
| nitrogen) and no humans banging stuff (by accident I
| assume), plays a role
| wrkronmiller wrote:
| It would be nice to see some numbers on energy used to power this
| versus a regular set of servers.
|
| Also nice if they discussed the energy/cost involved with
| deploying and retrieving these capsules and how well that would
| amortize if this became a commercial solution.
| zweifuss wrote:
| From https://natick.research.microsoft.com/ Phase 1
| demonstrated the feasibility of the subsea datacenter concept,
| including our ability to remotely operate a Lights Out
| datacenter* for long periods of time, operating with a highly
| efficient PUE (power usage effectiveness is total power divided
| by server power; lower values are better, 1.0 is perfect) of
| 1.07, and using no water at all, for a perfect WUE (water usage
| effectiveness is the liters consumed per megawatt of power per
| minute; lower values are better, 0 is best) of exactly 0 vs
| land datacenters which consume up to 4.8 liters of water per
| kilowatt-hour. For Phase 2, our goals are to:
|
| Develop one full scale prototype subsea datacenter, which could
| be used as a modular building block to aggregate subsea
| datacenters of arbitrary size
|
| Gain an understanding of the economics of undersea datacenter
| TCO (total cost of ownership is the full lifetime cost of a
| datacenter including manufacture, deployment, operations, and
| recovery) should we proceed to commercial deployment.
| rozab wrote:
| >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.
|
| So, nothing to do with it being underwater?
| angry_octet wrote:
| Another example of the journalistic malpractice of not linking to
| the original articles or data.
|
| https://natick.research.microsoft.com/
|
| https://news.microsoft.com/innovation-stories/project-natick...
|
| One of the facts left unmentioned is that this was built and
| operated by Naval, the French state-owned submarine and
| shipbuilding corporation.
| calibas wrote:
| Especially scummy when they've also broken the functionality of
| the back button and all the links are to other BBC articles.
|
| It's like the main function of the site is to trap you.
| andrewnicolalde wrote:
| If you're in the US like I am, I think it's because the BBC
| redirects all non-UK visitors to BBC.com, and so when you hit
| the back button from BBC.com you get sent back to BBC.co.uk
| which in turn redirects you to BBC.com. It gets on my nerves
| too.
| zymhan wrote:
| I thought back-button hijacking, malicious or accidental,
| had been solved in browsers years ago. I suppose I need to
| go search for an extension to fix that instead.
| codetrotter wrote:
| Could be but I am also seeing a trend where some websites
| manipulate the navigation history so that when you click
| the back button in your browser you end up at their home
| page even if you came to the page you are currently on via
| some other site.
|
| I first saw this on Facebook but I have since seen even
| sites that I used to respect follow this same pattern.
|
| To me this is nothing but another dark pattern.
| anigbrowl wrote:
| Wouldn't it be nice to have a browser engineered to
| protect against that? I'm tired of struggling with dark
| patterns every day, from URL hijacking to modal dialogs
| with deliberately broken layouts to scrolljacking.
| dang wrote:
| " _Please don 't complain about website formatting, back-
| button breakage, and similar annoyances. They're too common
| to be interesting. Exception: when the author is present.
| Then friendly feedback might be helpful._"
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
| Kydlaw wrote:
| I don't get your point? Why is it that relevant to you?
| kevincox wrote:
| 1. Linking to your sources is a good practice. 2. Their
| article adds little if any insight over the original article.
| I would often prefer to see the source and read it
| instead/additionally.
| zymhan wrote:
| Breaking news: Experts on underwater vessel construction
| asked to construct underwater vessel.
| angry_octet wrote:
| Is it not significant that this level of expertise is
| required? Do you think Microsoft paid Naval, or did they want
| to acquire expertise? Why use Naval rather than a civilian
| focused fabricator?
|
| When you consider the significance of undersea cables to the
| global economy, the propensity of states to intercept them
| covertly, the difficulty of attacking or even finding
| submersed compute, and so on, the ramifications are
| significantly greater than 'green compute'.
| s_dev wrote:
| It rewards originality over the long term rather than the
| fastest copy and paster.
|
| Sort of like how we try link to the original YouTube video.
| bredren wrote:
| Understanding what is OC is an increasingly important point
| for digital content makers, from memes to ideas for
| explainer videos.
|
| I think with actual articles written by presumed
| journalists, linking to source data is what establishes the
| credibility of the author's writing and suggests they have
| read and understand the content.
|
| Not linking to it doesn't mean the author doesn't
| understand it, but it may mean their work does nothing more
| than regurgitate (adds nothing of value apart from
| increased distribution)
| adrianmonk wrote:
| > _journalistic malpractice of not linking_
|
| That disease is very prevalent, and I don't understand why.
|
| My less-cynical guess is that the industry is stuck in the
| past, and journalists need better training and tools.
|
| My more-cynical guess is that they are afraid of irrelevance,
| so they are defensively trying to keep you in their walled
| garden of information instead of encouraging you to get into
| the habit of getting info more directly.
| mips_avatar wrote:
| It seems an additional hurdle is anti-fouling. Those barnacles
| and algae act as an insulator, making the cold-water cooling
| advantage less and less of an advantage.
| mc32 wrote:
| Maybe there's a temp at which it's too warm for barnacles
| --question is can the systems within operate at that
| temperature?
| morsch wrote:
| The system within would have to operate at a (considerably)
| higher temperature, since there's a temperature gradient
| involved and the place where the barnacles are is the coolest
| part of the whole structure.
| OldHand2018 wrote:
| Maybe they will release some cooling data that quantifies the
| effect!
| hangonhn wrote:
| Is that really still an issue? From my understanding, it's sort
| of a solved problem.
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-AdW030xQB4
| Hnrobert42 wrote:
| That's a cool video with interesting information, but I don't
| think the conclusion from it that fouling is a solved issue.
| nomel wrote:
| I can't imagine a field of these (which I assume is the
| eventual goal), covered in biocides, would be that great for
| the environment.
| endtime wrote:
| If the surface were that hot, would sea creatures still want to
| live on it? I have no idea what their range of tolerance is,
| but I'd assume that they're well adapted for living on
| relatively cool rocks. And if it's not that hot, then it seems
| like there's not a cooling problem.
|
| (To be clear, I'm speculating without any real knowledge of
| this subject, and welcome the inevitable corrections.)
| LinuxBender wrote:
| The best resources for this would be the sites that talk
| about the marine life around nuclear power plants. I do not
| have links handy, but those would be good places to start.
| winrid wrote:
| The surface of this container won't get that hot.
| Etheryte wrote:
| The ocean is host to a very wide number of creatures and
| bacteria, some live in arctic cold waters, others on volcanic
| vents, and every range in between. There's a good saying for
| this, roughly translated, that nature doesn't love an empty
| spot -- if one type of plant or bacteria won't live in an
| area, someone else will quickly settle in.
| shuntress wrote:
| I am familiar with that sentiment expressed through the
| phrase "nature abhors a vacuum"
| smaddox wrote:
| The irony is that this phrase predates the Torricelli
| experiment, in which he used a glass vial and mercury to
| produce a vacuum, and the eventual discovery that the
| vast majority of nature _is_ a vacuum (outside of the
| atmosphere of planets and stars).
| freehunter wrote:
| And if it wasn't for gravity, everything inside the
| atmosphere of planets and stars would be rushing to fill
| that vacuum. Nature abhors a vacuum, but that's only
| tempered by the fact that there are more powerful forces
| than vacuums.
| skosch wrote:
| That's not quite right. Even if there were no gravity or
| other forces, there would be no incentive for matter to
| go in one direction vs another, regardless of the
| distribution of matter around it. Over time you'd get a
| uniform-ish distribution, but that's a question of
| statistical mechanics, not one of pressure differences.
|
| On earth, matter only rushes to fill vacuums because the
| surrounding air or water pressure pushes it in.
| jakear wrote:
| Vacuum doesn't necessarily mean pressure-vacuum. It
| roughly means extreme concentration gradient, which is as
| you've described universal.
| smaddox wrote:
| Don't forget, even within individual atoms, the
| overwhelming majority of the space is a vacuum.
| YawningAngel wrote:
| We have "nature abhors a vacuum" in English
| egberts1 wrote:
| We have a new phrase, "Gravity abhors a vacuum."
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| In a post-Dyson world, many vacuums rely on gravity to
| work.
| meshaneian wrote:
| Anyone hearing one abhors a vacuum; in fact they are
| designed to _amplify_ certain sounds, such as dust
| particles passing through the system. Consumers equate
| "loud" with "powerful" and this improves sales and
| product opinions. Yes, I'm aware this is a different kind
| of vacuum.
| s_dev wrote:
| I think these quotes are coming from either end of the
| spectrum of physics and biology and don't necessarily say
| the same thing.
| jakear wrote:
| The beauty of the phrase is that it's universal.
| __MatrixMan__ wrote:
| Is it?
|
| I want to talk with aliens as much as the next guy, but
| so far it seems like the vast majority of the universe is
| a vacuum--biologically speaking.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| That's because there is not much stuff in the universe,
| and whatever there is, tends to cluster together under
| gravity. But within such a cluster, if you create empty
| space, something will want to rush to fill it in.
| Const-me wrote:
| The container is huge, and the insulation by algae is not that
| good. Anti-fouling matters for boats because increases energy
| consumption when it sails. Pretty sure for the datacenter it
| only contributes to a few degrees C.
| megablast wrote:
| You can get anti fouling that lasts for 10 years.
| [deleted]
| sandworm101 wrote:
| >> Those barnacles and algae act as an insulator
|
| Maybe not. Barnacles probably conduct heat at a similar rate to
| water. And they create a rougher surface with greater contact
| area to the surrounding water. And some of them actively filter
| water, push it around. Perhaps having a layer of barnacles
| woudl increase cooling.
| kevin_thibedeau wrote:
| These should be built into the outflow of hydro stations to
| counteract the unnatural cooling of the downstream river water.
| dathanb82 wrote:
| How do hydroelectric plants unnaturally cool water going
| through them?
| isbjorn16 wrote:
| My reasoning would be that hydroelectric plants dam up the
| water and the water at the lower levels of the reservoir is
| that which spins the turbines (and is released). I would
| imagine the "original" depth of the water being discharged
| has a non-trivial impact on downstream river temperatures -
| though I lack any and all qualifications necessary to say
| this with any degree of certainty.
| geophertz wrote:
| The thing is that if putting data centers underwater solves the
| cooling problem, all the heat produced is wasted, so it this
| really a good solution?
| CydeWeys wrote:
| It's literally waste heat, what else are you going to use it
| for? You won't efficiently generate electricity with it or
| anything like that. About the best you could hope for is
| warming up inhabited spaces in winter, but that ends up not
| being cost-effective because you'd rather have the data centers
| in the middle of nowhere where land is cheap.
| crazygringo wrote:
| 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 doesn't seem right to
| even frame it as "wasting" heat in the first place, anymore
| than the sun's heat was being "wasted" warming up the ocean in
| the first place.
| jarvist wrote:
| 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 air.
| Dahoon wrote:
| There are towns in Denmark getting heat from Google and
| Facebook datacenters so I don't see why it shouldn't work
| elsewhere. The way MS does it here the heat is 100% waste and
| should be taxed like other waste. Not to mention what about
| the noise? The sea is already noise polluted.
|
| Here's a source (in Danish). Wind energy in -> 25 MW/h of
| heat out (to heat up 12.000 houses):
|
| https://www.computerworld.dk/art/252732/facebook-vores-
| data-...
| nomel wrote:
| If the power is generated from waves, wouldn't the energy
| would have gone to waste at the shoreline/breaker anyways?
| ericmcer wrote:
| It isn't wasted it is helping to heat up the oceans.
| da_chicken wrote:
| The heat produced in a traditional data center is already
| unwanted and wasted and takes a ton of electricity and
| machinery to get rid of. Given that processors like to operate
| around 50 C, that's not a lot of heat to preserve and transport
| and do something useful with.
| azurezyq wrote:
| That's the cruel part of the thermodynamics. The waste heat
| here is not hot enough so it's really difficult for the
| recovery effort to reach a reasonable efficiency economically.
|
| That's why you don't see it...
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carnot%27s_theorem_(thermodyna...
| Dahoon wrote:
| Sure you see it. This is just a way to try to get rid of
| waste for free. Both Google and Facebook (Apple too I
| believe) delivers heated water to heat up houses from their
| datacenters. The one near me (Facebook) takes in wind energy
| and produces 25MW an hour and heats up 12.000 houses by wind
| energy and waste heat.
| FartyMcFarter wrote:
| I don't know if it's the best solution, but it would seem to
| beat the "use A/C to cool it" solution.
| justinclift wrote:
| Hmmm, how does one go about "buying" pieces of underwater real
| estate just off the coastline, in order to set up an underwater
| data center there?
|
| Wonder if it's a "speak to the local council" thing, or more a
| "speak to the local (?) maritime body"?
| ramon wrote:
| I don't like the idea since raising water temperatures affects
| life in the ocean like coral reefs.
| AlanSE wrote:
| This has been covered again and again in other comments.
| Thermal power plants dump heat into oceans today. The data
| center is much more efficient than a counterpart on land.
|
| Ocean life and coral reefs are in danger due to temperature
| rise as a part of climate change. Energy efficiency helps
| reduce that temperature rise.
| hinkley wrote:
| And when we make something much more efficient, we just end
| up making more of them.
| scrollaway wrote:
| If we make more of them, it's because there's a need for
| it.
|
| There isn't an "increased demand in datacenters" just
| because datacenters are more efficient. There's still the
| same demand, but it can now be met more efficiently.
|
| If the process was not as efficient, you would still
| attempt to meet the demand, except that you're producing
| more waste (waste heat especially in this case), over a
| _longer period of time_.
|
| Waste is waste, reducing it is never a negative.
| hinkley wrote:
| Nobody needs more data centers, except for people trying
| to build their empires.
|
| People need services and data centers are how they get
| them. If data centers are expensive then I invest in
| efficiency work because 3 FTEs are cheaper than 2
| additional data centers. If the centers are cheaper I
| will just burn watts to solve my problem, and spend those
| employees on something else.
| scrollaway wrote:
| You're describing demand.
| ramon wrote:
| No, actually there has been already many studies that there's
| no turning back on climate change. Even going all electric
| energy it's not going to do much for climate change, there's
| no turning back on this aspect at all.
| scrollaway wrote:
| It's not a binary switch.
| buzzerbetrayed wrote:
| After reading GP's comment multiple times, I do not see any
| place where he mentioned turning back climate change. So
| whether or not your comment is true, it doesn't seem to
| contradict anything GP said.
|
| If we wanted to accelerate climate change, we could
| obviously do so (as proven in the last century). Meaning we
| have an impact on the acceleration of climate change.
| Meaning we can make decisions to make that acceleration
| slower, rather than faster.
| ramon wrote:
| https://climate.nasa.gov/
| buzzerbetrayed wrote:
| Is there something on there that contradicts what I said?
| I'm not going to scour the entire website to find
| whatever it is you're referring to when you could just
| tell me (except you probably can't because I'm guessing
| it doesn't exist.. hence your vagueness).
| ramon wrote:
| What is your objetive here in this forum? Is it to pick a
| fight?
| oh_sigh wrote:
| Not many coral reefs off of Orkney.There's Lophelia pertusa but
| that only grows at > 100m depth, whereas this data center was
| placed at ~30m.
| ryanmarsh wrote:
| I wonder what the engineering tradeoffs are for building
| sealed/unserviceable capsules vs. pumping cold seawater a few
| hundred meters to an on-shore DC?
|
| It seems you're just replacing the air/refrigerant heat exchanger
| for an air/water heat exchanger. Also, an onshore facility could
| be run in 100% nitrogen as well without the difficulty of
| managing an artificial reef connected to fiber and power.
| sktrdie wrote:
| Why not put them in... space?
|
| Lots of energy (direct sun) and cold temperatures up there. I
| guess space debris could be an issue.
| thomond wrote:
| Connectivity is an important factor for Data Centres needless
| to say, how would that work in space?
| CydeWeys wrote:
| Contrary to popular belief, space in the vicinity of Earth's
| orbit is not cold. Indeed, it's very hot. You get the full
| unfiltered force of sunlight (hotter than noon on the equator),
| _and_ you don 't have any material available nearby like air or
| water to convect the heat away. Cooling is actually a huge
| problem in orbit, way harder than on Earth where you can just
| use fans.
| malwrar wrote:
| Besides the obstacle of it being difficult to cool objects in
| space (you need atmosphere to do convection cooling, i.e.
| heatsinks), you need to somehow actually get everything in
| space. It costs a lot of money to get heavy things into orbit,
| whereas it costs nothing to sink those same objects in the
| water which naturally has better thermal conductivity to boot.
| As another bonus, you can get at it much easier if you need to
| perform maintenance by e.g. attaching pods to a crane rig and
| simply raising it.
| tehbeard wrote:
| Yeah, temperature is a little more complicated than that in
| space...
|
| You're only option of removing heat is radiating it away (no
| atmosphere/fluid to conduct/convect to). You're also roasting
| on one half of the orbit, freezing on the other side.
|
| If you look at the ISS they have HUGE radiators for what's
| little more than a small outpost.
|
| Solar's only good for half-ish of the orbit, you'll be reliant
| on batteries for the darkside (more mass, limited lifespan)
|
| Not to mention the dV costs of orbit.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| As I understand it, the temperature is cold in space, but it's
| still difficult to transfer heat from yourself to the
| environment (because there's nothing in the environment to
| absorb the energy).
|
| You don't want low temperatures for their own sake; you want
| them to facilitate heat loss.
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