[Beowulf] More about those underwater data centers

[John Hearns]

Gerald refers to the web scale datacentres, where the door is shut and
servers just fail, till this exceeds a certain threshold.
I would move this discussion on - the initial guarantee for HPC servers is
three years, with many customers in the UK Assking for a five year  year
support plan. After this the servers are disposed. of...
Have we faced up to the environmental impact of this?
It is often said that CPUs can be upgraded - I have only once seen an
upgrade in place in my career. By the time a couple of years have elapsed
you are better going for the next generation of servers.
I dont have a magic wand to wave to solve this problem, but it is something
we should be thinking about.


On Sun, 4 Nov 2018 at 14:10, Gerald Henriksen <ghenriks at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Sat, 3 Nov 2018 18:27:05 +0000, you wrote:
>
> > I’m not sure there’s a huge population of Xcloud-Xbox gamers in Orkney.
> There's not much daylight this time of year, of course, so maybe that's
> what those Orcadians are up to.
>
> Likely just a convenient place for a second test unit.
>
> In a way this is just an extension of the idea/product Sun came up wth
> where they put a datacentre in a shipping container with the idea that
> you could quickly get the datacentre where it was needed.
>
> While I wouldn't say this won't fail, I think there is a lot of
> attraction to the concept given not just the time lag do build a
> traditional data centre (mentioned in the article), but even the cost
> of real estate in many/most places people live these days.  Do you,
> for one example, want to pay NYC rents or just throw a bunch of pods
> in the Hudson?
>
> I guess once you accept the idea that we no longer maintain these
> datacentres in the traditional way - we now just let hardware fail in
> place and ignore it until it's time to replace all the hardware -
> moving to smaller sealed units doesn't seem to strange.
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