

Inside the Arctic Circle, Where Your Facebook Data Live - aelaguiz
http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2013-10-03/facebooks-new-data-center-in-sweden-puts-the-heat-on-hardware-makers

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randomdestructn
> with fewer components they can function at temperatures as high as 85F.
> (Most servers are expected to keel over at 75F.)

I'm no datacentre guy, so can someone clarify if this is a typo? What kind of
electronics start failing just above room temperature?

I'd think HDDs would be the most sensitive, but google said failures aren't
well correlated to hdd temp
([http://research.google.com/archive/disk_failures.pdf‎](http://research.google.com/archive/disk_failures.pdf‎))

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coherentpony
Are you sure they don't actually mean celsius, rather than fahrenheit?

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bronson
Yep. 85degC is super hot, and junction temp is usually a few tens of degrees
hotter than the ambient temp. Even if the packaging and interconnects can
handle it, the dies themselves will fail early due to metal migration.

Of course, if the average working life of a Google server is measured in
months, then maybe that's no big deal.

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bonchibuji
Google built one in Finland a couple of years back. They are using the sea
water for cooling.

[http://www.google.com/about/datacenters/inside/locations/ham...](http://www.google.com/about/datacenters/inside/locations/hamina/index.html)

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DanBC
> Facebook’s data center (bottom) spends nearly two-thirds less energy on
> power and cooling than a typical facility. The building’s upper level (top)
> pumps in frigid air, cooling the servers below, then vents warmer air
> outside

Pumping warm air outside feels really wasteful.

Is there any work on increasing efficiencies with waste heat?

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fennecfoxen
No? It would be inefficient to put a lot of effort and capital into trying to
extract useful work from a marginally-above-room-temperature exhaust stream.
Something about thermodynamics and low efficiencies at small temperature
gradients :P

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danpat
You're not thinking like someone that lives in a cold place :-P

In cold climates, the heat could be distributed to reduce the heating load in
other buildings during cold months.

Where I live (Alberta, Canada), it's continuously below freezing for at least
3 months, and often below for 2-3 months either side of that. People would be
all over getting free heat from a neighbour, even if it was just a little bit.

~~~
dorfsmay
But they are on the edge of a small town.

By the way, aren't all data centres in Alberta (at least in YYC) just pumping
out the heat outside?

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coherentpony
I don't understand what the Arctic circle has to do with this. It's a data
centre, not an HPC cluster. Data centres don't run nearly as hot as clusters.

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rypskar
I do also have a problem understanding what the Arctic Circle has to do with
this. North of arctic circle in America and Scandinavia is two totally
different things

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klausjensen
Ok, I'll bite. What do you mean?

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jsnell
The Nordic countries have a rather mild climate despite being so far north. To
have a comparable temperature in the Americas, you'd usually need to be a
couple of thousand kilometers further south. (E.g. I guess the climates of
Boston and Stockholm might be roughly comparable, but Boston is actually on
the same latitude as Rome).

So if you tell an American that something is almost at the Arctic circle,
their intuition will tell them it's a very rough and almost uninhabited place.
You tell it to a Finn, and they'll think that it's where the fourth largest
metropolitan area of the country is, or where you go for a comfortable ski
holiday.

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spongle
Probably no privacy laws there ;)

~~~
coherentpony
Did you mean 'ample' rather than 'no'?

'No' privacy laws => surveillance.

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freehunter
I think he meant Facebook's privacy policy, not NSA spying.

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mathattack
I assume the title will get fixed. I think the interesting thing is it's
located in Sweden due to power reasons.

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paulbennett
Does pumping out heat in a cold area like this have any meaningful effect on
local climate or environment?

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brryant
There are so many typos in this article that it reads like a FB post

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hablahaha
So I get that it might be grammatically correct to use 'Data Live', but it
sounds quite strange to me, I've never actually run across this before.

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sidcool
Arctic circle. OK. Cool.

~~~
bestest
nope. apparently it's article circle. (seriously though, how the hell does one
mistype it like this!)

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coldcode
Polar bears work cheap.

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dynofuz
Great! Just what we need to accelerate the melting of the ice caps.

