[Beowulf] Underwater data centers -- the future?

[John Hearns]

Or a 'boiling the seas and killing every living being on the land' point of view.

Remember:
* the law if unintended consequences
* we are in the Anthropocene era
* Global data centres draw as much power as he entire country of Italy.
  This would be like throwing an electric fire the size of Italy into the Atlantic.


Sorry, I am taking the wee very much here.
The entire global heat load on the Earth isnt changed whether or not you out the data centre on land or in the sea.
Yes, there could be local heating effects which bring in the law of unintended consequences.
I was raised in the town of Clydebank - home to a huge Singer manufacturing plan. They had their own power station,
and discharged hot cooling water into the local canal.  The canal was famous for having giant goldfish a foot long.

Also I know the Swiss HPC centre uses Lake Lugano water for cooling - but they are not allowed to dump it back with
too high a temperature differential, in case of environmental consequences.




________________________________________
From: Beowulf [beowulf-bounces at beowulf.org] on behalf of Andrew Leahy [aleahy at knox.edu]
Sent: 07 September 2016 15:06
To: Beowulf List
Subject: [Beowulf] Underwater data centers -- the future?

Listening in on the heated discussion of immersive cooling while I was
sitting on the shores of Lake Superior this summer, I was reminded of a
recent NYT article on Microsoft's Project Natick:

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/01/technology/microsoft-plumbs-oceans-depths-to-test-underwater-data-center.html?_r=0

The idea is that you circumvent the cooling problem altogether by
dumping data centers in the ocean.  I'm curious if anybody has crunched
the numbers on this idea to see if it makes sense, just from a cooling
perspective.

Andrew Leahy


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