
Microsoft has sunk a data centre in the sea to investigate energy efficiency - Qworg
http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-44368813
======
cm2187
> _Additionally because there are no people, we can take all the oxygen and
> most of the water vapour out of the atmosphere which reduces corrosion,
> which is a significant problem in data centres_

First time I hear corrosion is a problem in datacentres. I never noticed any
corrosion on any machine at home or work. Does it have to do with the cooling
of datacentres?

~~~
mpweiher
I think part of it is that even problems that are small/unnoticeable at the
individual level become big when multiplied by a huge N.

For example, I don't think I've ever had a hard drive fail in ~30 years in
computing, well without being dropped that is, yet look at the Backblaze
reports:

[https://www.backblaze.com/blog/hard-drive-benchmark-
stats-20...](https://www.backblaze.com/blog/hard-drive-benchmark-stats-2016/)

~~~
overcast
That's just unbelievable. To even survive the Deskstar era blows my mind. Not
a single drive?

~~~
sundvor
Argh trigger alert, I bought four of those in a raid 10.

They even had the audacity to reject my warranty claim.

~~~
overcast
They sent me back refurbs that didn't work, I just gave up.

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

~~~
seszett
If my calculation is correct, the total annual electricity production in the
world (I used 20 279 PWh) would heat up the oceans (1 347 000 000 km³ of
water) by 0,0129°C.

It's rather easy to calculate because one calorie is the energy required to
heat up one gramme of water by one degree Celsius, the rest is just unit
conversions, but I could have messed up anywhere of course.

Even if I'm off by a few orders of magnitude I'm confident that datacenters
won't be noticeably heating up the sea for a long time.

~~~
jwilk
According to
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_electrici...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_electricity_production)
, total electricity production is about 24816400 GWh/year (~25 PWh/year, so
you were 3 orders of magnitude off).

    
    
      $ units -t '24816400 GWh / (1347000000 km^3) / (1 kg/dm^3) / (4200 J/kg/K)'
      1.5908368e-05 K

~~~
Faaak
Units is a wonderful program; don't be afraid to use their definitions
(/usr/share/units/definitions.units):

    
    
      $ units -t '24816400 GWh / (1347000000 km^3) / waterdensity / water_specificheat'
      1.5851925e-05 K
    

There's even definitions like `oceanarea`, etc ;-)

------
brian_cloutier
> Prof Ian Bitterlin, a data centre consultant for nearly 30 years, is
> sceptical about the environmental impact of going underwater.

> "You just end up with a warmer sea and bigger fish," he says.

> And 90% of Europe's data centres are in big cities such as London and Madrid
> because that is where they are needed.

> Microsoft's Ben Cutler insists the warming effect will be minimal - "the
> water just metres downstream would get a few thousandths of a degree warmer
> at most" \- and the overall environmental impact of the Orkney data centre
> will be positive.

Both of these opinions feel like exaggerations but I don't know enough about
thermodynamics to know what the true answer is. I have a feeling that the
Microsoft opinion is much closer to the truth, can anyone help me understand
how I'd walk through the numbers?

~~~
jgtrosh
Not an expert either, but this might be a good way to think about it: on land
or at sea, the machines produce the same amount of heat. On land, in general,
the environment around the machines will be much warmer than the desired temp.
Cooling on land is in general an active affair, which has to do with
generating and controlling flow of fluid and/or maybe some kind of thermic
reaction. Potentially at sea being plunged in cold water is sufficient to
reach the desired temp, and cooling becomes a passive affair. All in all you
are trying to displace the same amount of heat but through a more efficient
medium. Correct me if I'm wrong.

~~~
snarfy
I'm trying to see how the efficiency is gained and I just don't really see it.
I guess you don't need to pump water for water cooling so you save the pumping
energy, or maybe lower fan speeds or something, but it really seems like it
would be a minimal amount. What it does seem like is a cheap way to build a
water cooling system that doesn't really need to be maintained. It seems like
switching to arm would be a much bigger efficiency gain, but nobody cares
because energy is cheap.

~~~
freeone3000
Switching to ARM _might_ be a bigger efficiency gain, but nobody wants arm.
Azure already offers ARM servers. Moreover, these aren't exclusive - one can
easily sink an ARM server just as easily as you can sink an Intel one.

But the efficiency gains are such: Air conditioning is actually inefficient,
especially with air cooling. Water cooling is more efficient. Water cooling
traditionally uses water as an exchange medium, but is eventually water-
cooled-by-air anyway, just in bigger batches. Here, they can take in new cold
water and throw out old hot water without actually bothering with any air
exchange at all. Or at least, that's the plan. Maybe it'll work!

(If "nobody cares because energy is cheap", we wouldn't have tried this in the
first place.)

------
WalterBright
I don't understand why not locating it in a city in a cold climate and using
the waste heat to heat the city buildings?

There is precedent. In Seattle there's the old "steam plant" which piped steam
to many local buildings to heat them in winter.

~~~
dwyerm
You're talking about District Heating[1], and that's been around for decades
in hundreds of cities. It's the source of the steaming manhole covers that are
a fixture of noir imagery.

Denver's got the oldest continually operating system in the world, and within
the last decade or so, they added a cooling loop, as well. Instead of a boiler
and a cooling tower, you can subscribe to a steam loop and a chiller loop.

The problem is once again of gradient. It makes thermodynamic sense to pipe
steam around, because of the large gradient between steam and ambient. But
servers don't make steam. At best they make warm water only a couple of dozen
degrees over ambient... and warm water doesn't have enough energy to heat
buildings very effectively.

That said, and as someone already mentioned, people are doing it anyway.
Seattle's internet exchange pipes its water across the street to the Amazon
towers[2].

BTW, Seattle's Georgetown steam plant might not be making steam any more, but
the one down by the market is still operating as Emwave Seattle[3].

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/District_heating](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/District_heating)

[2] [https://blog.aboutamazon.com/sustainability/the-super-
effici...](https://blog.aboutamazon.com/sustainability/the-super-efficient-
heat-source-hidden-below-amazons-new-headquarters)

[3]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seattle_Steam_Company](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seattle_Steam_Company)

~~~
WalterBright
> At best they make warm water only a couple of dozen degrees over ambient

Consider that geothermal heating systems are based on the ground having a
temperature of 55 degrees. The difference between that and cooler ambient is
used to drastically reduce heating bills.

For example, if it is 30 degrees outside, that is heated to 55 by the earth,
then the building heater only has to boost the 55 to 70 rather than 30 to 70.

------
sathackr
I wonder why they are submerging these instead of just making them a floating
barge.

I can't imagine submersion is significantly better for cooling, the energy
density very likely already requires a circulating water system, and the added
issues dealing with the pressure at depth seem risky.

Possibly there is a benefit not related to cooling. Perhaps weather/waves?
Things are probably alot calmer 30ft below the surface. The tossing and
turning on the surface may place additional streses on things like HDD
spidles.

~~~
djtriptych
HDD spindles????

~~~
sathackr
Spinning hard drives have a decent gryoscopic effect. Hold one while it's
powered up and try rotating it in a manner that would change the plane of the
platters and you will feel the resistance.

Each time you do that, it puts a slight load on the spindle bearings. Do it
repeatedly on a varying 5-30 second cycle and you'll simulate what a harddrive
on a boat or barge in the open water would experience.

I can imagine that would create additional wear and tear and contribute to an
increased failure rate.

~~~
djtriptych
Right but who is deciding to use spinning hard drives instead of SSDs in an
underwater data center?

~~~
crb002
Cooling fan spindles are subject to the same forces; and they had a large
array of cooling fans.

~~~
laggyluke
I doubt they're going to use fans if they are pumping the air out of the
thing.

------
Qworg
Here's some more information from the blog post:
[https://news.microsoft.com/features/under-the-sea-
microsoft-...](https://news.microsoft.com/features/under-the-sea-microsoft-
tests-a-datacenter-thats-quick-to-deploy-could-provide-internet-connectivity-
for-years/)

And here's the project site:
[http://natick.research.microsoft.com/](http://natick.research.microsoft.com/)

~~~
igravious
Wow. That is super interesting. Thanks for sharing.

------
dorfsmay
I wish somebody worked on using that unwanted heat, like they do in swimming
pool / ice rink combos, rather than finding ways to just disperse it faster in
the environment.

~~~
adrianmonk
It's tough in hot climates. There's plenty of heat to go around. And there are
lots of people who live in hot climates who, for latency reasons, need servers
near them.

Thus there are kind of two cases to solve for. You can stick a data center in
Northern Europe, and that heat might be valuable enough that your approach
could be to try to reclaim it. If you stick a data center in Singapore, you'd
better focus on generating less heat in the first place or finding better ways
to get rid of it.

~~~
therealdrag0
Even in Singapore the max sea temperature is 32C, which seems cool enough to
cool a data-center.

------
Redoubts
Some non-environmental reasons for wanting to do this:

[http://www.alexwg.org/publications/PhysRevE_82-056104.pdf](http://www.alexwg.org/publications/PhysRevE_82-056104.pdf)

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

------
choonway
I don't think this is done for the sake of efficiency, but rather latency.

For example, if you had a underwater data center that sat in the middle of the
atlantic ocean in between new york and london, you could do some serious
trading with that capability.

~~~
Nican
Even in the coast of large cities, like NYC or Boston. The real state cost of
having a data center in those regions are high, but it would be much cheaper
to just hide your servers underwater, near where your users are.

~~~
wpdev_63
This is a big reason. The cost of leasing out space is definitely more
expensive than the cost of cooling these datacenters.

Why spend several million dollars in leasing space when you can drop a
datacenter capsule off the coast with free cooling? Who cares about the cost
of hardware.

~~~
pjc50
The cost of connecting the thing via submarine cable to a suitable land point
is likely to be a lot higher than you think.

~~~
antpls
Do you have a source to back this statement?

------
sp0ck
I wonder what will be algae/flora impact on a heat exchange after year or two.
This thing will be warm and stationary so it will became overgrown really
fast.

~~~
faleidel
We could look at hydrothermal vents to see the effect of heat source
underwater.

~~~
wlesieutre
The heat from hydrothermal vents on its own wouldn't support ecosystems in
deep water, they also feed out various useful chemicals and nutrients. The
base of these foodchains is creatures that can build biological carbon stuff
using chemical energy from that instead of using light, called
"chemosynthesis".

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chemosynthesis](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chemosynthesis)

------
amatai
Well everyone is talking about the energy usage, which is the point of the
experiment.

But what happens after 5 years (the expected life of the datacenter). Most of
the computers in there will be worthless then. Will they bring up the
datacenter and reload it with new equipment? Will the cost-benefit be in favor
of re-equipment or just sink a new one in? If its going to be cheaper to just
drop a new one in, we will have ocean floor littered with dead datacenters.

Haven't heard anything about this.

~~~
goda90
Even if the equipment is outdated and broken, the scrap might be worth
something to someone.

------
nabla9
If you want maximum energy efficiency, build city centers in cold climates
where the excess heat can be used. Yandex has data center in city of Mäntsälä,
Finland and they provide 50 percent of the heating needs.

Even more advanced concept, combined district heating and cooling. With
combined district heating and cooling and integrate data centers into them.
Data center heat can be used in cold regions for heating. Combined heat
pump/chiller units can produce both heat and cooling at the same time. Sea
water (trough absorption chillers) is used for cooling apartments, offices and
data centers. Heat from data centers, purified waste water, etc. is used for
heating apartments. During winter more heat is utilized. During summers more
water cooling is utilize.

[https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2010/jul/20/helsinki...](https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2010/jul/20/helsinki-
data-centre-heat-homes)

Suvilahti Data Centre New Build Case Study: Operationalizing District Heating
and Cooling in large Data Centre in Former Electricity Station
[http://www.energy-cities.eu/IMG/pdf/WS2_Helsinki.pdf](http://www.energy-
cities.eu/IMG/pdf/WS2_Helsinki.pdf)

[https://www.helen.fi/en/company/energy/energy-
production/pow...](https://www.helen.fi/en/company/energy/energy-
production/power-plants/katri-vala-heating-and-cooling-plant/)

COMBINED DISTRICT HEATING AND COOLING [https://www.euroheat.org/wp-
content/uploads/2016/04/Case-stu...](https://www.euroheat.org/wp-
content/uploads/2016/04/Case-study-Helsinki-GDECA15.pdf)

District Heating & Cooling in Helsinki
[http://www.iea.org/media/workshops/2013/chp/markoriipinen.pd...](http://www.iea.org/media/workshops/2013/chp/markoriipinen.pdf)

~~~
comboy
It's all very clever, but think about the cost and complexity. Installations,
management, real estate, physical security etc.

I'm quite confident that even making optimal use of the excess heat you would
end up with less money than with their solution. I don't think companies want
maximum energy efficiency. They want maximum cost efficiency.

~~~
vortico
Exactly, cooling is expensive but not as much as human resources. With a
sinkable data center, you could put it next to any coastal or riverside city.

------
mlitwiniuk
So flooding a server starts to mean something completelly different

------
OnesimusUnbound
What would be its ecological impact? What if there are more of these data
centers?

------
lokopodium
Is there a benefit over just putting it in a boat/coastal building and using
water (perhaps pumped from some depth) for cooling?

~~~
kwhitefoot
Boats in that part of the world are subject to severe stresses because of the
weather. And boats are always moving, even in harbour. Just maintaining a
reliable cable connection to a boat is more challenging than connecting to a
subsea container. Placing the container on the sea floor avoids almost all of
the weather related problems.

~~~
Steltek
Microwave links? How about an oil derrick style thing mounted directly to the
seabed so it doesn't move?

There's also plenty of coastline away from major cities. Find enough open
space and it becomes feasibly multi-tenant. Add wind/solar and run a cable (or
3).

------
fafner
Imagine a future where whenever the energy price drops in a region suddenly
companies show up with a bunch of such tubes drop them in the ocean. Do some
batch processing and once the energy price rises they pull it out and move on.

In reality of course connectivity would be a major problem and energy price
differences are probably not large enough to make it viable.

~~~
cbcoutinho
Although it doesn't have anything to do with computational load, hydroelectric
storage exploits the change in electricity price to store energy in
hydroelectric systems. At low demand they pump water into the reservoir, and
at peak demand they release it again through turbines, generate electricity,
and sell it at the higher price.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pumped-
storage_hydroelectricit...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pumped-
storage_hydroelectricity)

------
nomercy400
Putting your datacenter in international waters, without laws or regulations,
hidden from the world. Such a great way to do things without people knowing,
or having people do things about it.

Power it with offshore windmills, and you really only need a network
connection.

Great idea though, using water to cool your datacenter and leaving all the
oxygen out.

~~~
dogma1138
Maritime law; there is no such thing as international waters for “stuff” each
vessel has to fly under a flag.

The MSFT Datacenter is a vessel under law, if they don’t want to fly it under
a flag they’ll have to essentially abandon it and then salvage laws come into
play.

~~~
freeflight
In that context, the Internets fascination with pirates makes a whole new
level of sense. Servers, classified as marine vessels, admins being literal
captains sailing under flags.

In a more fun world, one of those vessels would fly the Jolly Rogers and host
a certain infamous Swedish bay.

------
parliament32
> It will not be possible to repair the computers if they fail

This is the part that concerns me the most. Pretty much all DCs have multiple
24/7 staff to deal with hardware failures and equipment swaps... telling a
client "you can't access your hardware for 5 years" wouldn't go over too well.

~~~
ghostly_s
Well, you clearly wouldn't lease dedicated hardware with this model. You just
redistribute load amongst data pods when there is a failure, and pull the
whole pod from service for refurbishment once it passes your total failure
threshold.

------
outworlder
> This is a tiny data centre compared with the giant sheds that now store so
> much of the world's information, just 12 racks of servers but with enough
> room to store five million movies.

How much is that in Library of Congress units? This trend of not giving out
data but appearing to do so is strange.

~~~
fowie
"The Phase 2 datacenter can house 27.6 petabytes of data."

Assuming you're using 15TB as one LoC unit, then about 1,800 LoCs.

------
partycoder
Interesting idea but the maintenance must be painful. Let's say a hard disk
fails, what do you do?

~~~
fowie
It's a fail-in-place data center. If a hard disk fails, you don't do anything.
They used to replace telephony equipment all the time too, now it's just a
locked room in a building. This is pushing data centers to be more hands-off.

~~~
49bc
So they don’t do anything? Eventually you’re just maintaining stacks of
errored and broken computers.

~~~
loeg
Yeah. Fail in place over the service lifetime. When enough stuff is failed
that it isn't worth keeping down there, you pull it up and refill it.

~~~
49bc
Based on the picture, "pulling it up" looks like a fairly intensive task,
requiring boats, persons, etc.

That kind of thing eats directly into the ROI for a datacenter. I doubt it
competes with a static building with a bunch of solar panels on top.

~~~
loeg
Might just fail-in-place, then. Although that looks pretty bad from an
environmentalist perspective.

------
tomxor
As an aside in the article:

> There has been growing concern that the rapid expansion of the data centre
> industry could mean an explosion in energy use. But Emma Fryer, who
> represents the sector at Tech UK, says that fear has been exaggerated.

> "What's happened is we've had the benefit of Moore's Law. The continued
> advances in processing power have made doom-laden predictions look foolish"

There may be other reasons that energy efficiency will continue to improve,
but Moore's law, (More specifically in relation to performance per watt:
Dennard Scaling), has long been at an end. Given her position it's fairly
ignorant to sight this as a reason for a continued lower proportion of energy
consumption growth by now.

~~~
JacobJans
> In a normal year, demand for electric power in Chelan County grows by
> perhaps 4 megawatts ­­— enough for around 2,250 homes — as new residents
> arrive and as businesses start or expand. But since January 2017, as Bitcoin
> enthusiasts bid up the price of the currency, eager miners have requested a
> staggering 210 megawatts for mines they want to build in Chelan County.
> That’s nearly as much as the county and its 73,000 residents were already
> using.

Source:
[http://www.thenewstribune.com/news/business/article212008409...](http://www.thenewstribune.com/news/business/article212008409.html)

------
49bc
Interesting idea. My hunch tells me that they’re underestimating the corrosive
nature of salt water. I also wonder about vibrations, which are much more
pronounced underwater.

But I guess we won’t know until we try!

------
Normal_gaussian
I'd be curious to know the specific benefits of the Orkney Isles to this
project; when I hear the renewable research there being referenced (by family
there, some of whom are directly involved) they always claim the major benefit
is the close proximity of different underwater conditions, with some of the
greatest range in tide.

Yet I assume this isn't particularly useful for a datacentre of a well
understood shape that doesn't intend to use the conditions to create power
through novel designs.

~~~
oh_sigh
That's true specifically, but orkney has generally become a hub for renewables
research, so the snowball effect may be in play here.

------
DoubleCribble
If clusters of these tanks are eventually deployed, it could have some
surprising effects on local marine life and might be a good way to jumpstart a
marine preserve. [0] [0][https://www.abcactionnews.com/news/local-
news/clusters-of-ma...](https://www.abcactionnews.com/news/local-
news/clusters-of-manatees-spotted-at-tecos-big-bend-power-plant-keeping-warm-
from-cold-weather)

------
adzicg
This opens quite an interesting perspective for 'off-shore' hosting,
literally. I remember from a previous gig a while ago that renting servers in
Saskatchewan or something similar provided companies with a favourable
legislation as well as cheaper server cooling. If you plunge a data centre
into the middle of the sea somewhere in international waters, does it really
fall under any legislation?

~~~
jusssi
No legislation cuts both ways. Be prepared to fend off pirates and state
actors attempting to claim free loot.

------
yani
I can see a few robotic hands doing magic under the sea while being operated
remotely. Submarine drones deliver the hardware. I can see this helping MS to
move into the space and a huge boost for robotics. It will get there
eventually, I think the no maintenance is just to test if it is worth it
before going all in

------
navs
This can't be a new idea. Or is it that it's only now become possible to do
such a thing?

~~~
ino
I remember reading google was doing the same experiment some 10 years ago.

------
yarrel
Microsoft boiling the oceans is a positive move for environmentalism, hybrid
owners agree.

------
sbr464
What happens in a large body of water (ocean etc) when an electric shock
accidentally slips out or a live electric cable is cut? Is it similar to an
underwater grenade going off, affecting a large area, or is it not a worry?

~~~
MajorSauce
Electricity finds the path of least resistance.

If that power cable would be completely cut, the electricity would spark from
one of the pole of the cable to the other, until some breaker shuts the thing
off.

Even at great energy, the impact would be minimal.

------
0110011
Wondering how long it will be until we have cloud data centers in space...
Seems like it could be useful to offer a flexible computing infrastructure to
small sats and science missions without requiring ground comms.

~~~
simon_acca
Actually getting rid of excess energy is a huge problem in space since it's
pretty empty:
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/External_Active_Thermal_Cont...](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/External_Active_Thermal_Control_System)

~~~
0110011
Totally. It's the difficulties of putting lots of computing resources in space
(heat, power, serviceability, radiation) that actually makes it attractive for
selling compute time. Only one company needs to solve those problems and
others can leverage that work for a fee. If it was easy, there wouldn't be a
business opportunity.

------
the_arun
I think we should spend more "energy" on reducing the heat in the datacenter
and solve the problem for everyone. Cooling the datacenter in the sea seems
like a hacky (though creative) solution.

~~~
nashashmi
Laser based cooling systems is where we should put our focus.

------
CodeSheikh
At first I read it as "Microsoft has sunk GitHub in the sea...".

Sigh my brain is trained to see MS+GitHub wherever I read a news article about
MW or GH as a result of all the hype for past two days.

------
philip1209
What's the average lifetime of a data center? I wonder how the enclosure for
this underwater one compares, and whether it's comparable.

------
kyleperik
On a totally non-serious note:

Just reading "Microsoft has sunk a data centre" sounds pretty hilarious given
recent events (GDPR, acquiring GitHub)

------
cc-d
> There has been growing concern that the rapid expansion of the data centre
> industry could mean an explosion in energy use. But Emma Fryer, who
> represents the sector at Tech UK, says that fear has been exaggerated.

If we're concerned about the technology industry vastly increasing energy
consumption, lets look at the entire medium sized country's worth of energy
bitcoin is consuming for absolutely useless calculations.

~~~
gnode
Naturally scarce stores of value like Bitcoin, gold, diamonds, etc. have
always "wasted" resources, whether they be power, human resource, or polluting
the environment. On one hand you could regard them as immoral because of this,
on the other hand they enable the freedom to store value without trust.

~~~
cc-d
>Bitcoin, gold, diamond

You're being dishonest if you're pretending these things are identically
comparable.

~~~
d0lph
They're all arbitrary stores of value whos intrinsic value is not justified by
the market price?

~~~
rtkwe
Only Bitcoin requires the continuous consumption of energy to continue being a
useful asset though.

~~~
deegles
Physical gold still needs to be mined, smelted, transported, and guarded. When
you buy it and move it around energy is spent too. So if you really want an
apples-to-apples comparison you'd have to count the energy needed to mine each
oz. of gold.

~~~
rtkwe
The large majority of gold traded for bullion or investment isn't actually
moved. It's just the rights to claim X tr. oz. of gold in the vault of XYZ
company. Also value of my gold doesn't depend on the transport of all the gold
out there so rolling those costs in at the individual level doesn't make much
sense. BTC on the otherhand is useless without mining because the existence
and transfer of BTC depends on the miners. Even post lightning mining is still
critical to opening new channels.

~~~
deegles
The large majority of Bitcoin isn't actually moved every block either. And
those systems you describe to reassign rights to gold also use energy. As
block rewards fall, profit will come from transaction fees only, and only the
most efficient miners (best equipment or energy access) will remain. Sure,
Bitcoin uses more energy now than a database sitting on a server, but it's
solving a different problem.

~~~
rtkwe
It is solving a different problem but that doesn't change the fact that the
whole network's mining work is required to make it work. There are some energy
costs to tracking the rights of stored gold but they're vanishingly small
compared to BTC.

We're getting sucked down into the weeds here and losing sight of the original
point which is BTC as designed requires the use of massive amount of energy to
validate and secure the transaction ledger and that ledger and the things it
enables is the whole value of BTC.

~~~
perl4ever
I think gold _is_ flawed in essentially the same way as BTC. Mining BTC is
called mining because it's a neat abstraction of the old fashioned process.
The reason fiat currency took over historically is because there's a
tremendous benefit to eliminating the dead weight of mining if you can evolve
a more subtle way of limiting supply.

------
nashashmi
I am most concerned about the data cable getting cut by ships. Don't know why
nobody else here is concerned about that.

~~~
haldean
Because most of the internet already goes through under-sea cables? We're
pretty good at not cutting under-sea cables.

------
kulu2002
Would have loved to see FMEA done for this project. From both environment and
Data centre point of view.

------
bhagone
Lots of energy used in storing the data may not always produce effective
results.

------
zerop
And what would the effect on life in Water or environment affect of the same.

------
_bxg1
I'm sure the environmental impact of this one unit will be negligible, but if
the worlds largest tech companies start deploying thousands of these -
imaginable, since it's a pretty good idea from an engineering perspective - I
could see that causing some real problems.

~~~
decebalus1
> I could see that causing some real problems

Can you be more specific? What type of problems and why? Temperature-related,
waste related, hazardous substances? And why would this become a problem at-
scale?

~~~
_bxg1

      Prof Ian Bitterlin, a data centre consultant for nearly 30
      years, is sceptical about the environmental impact of going
      underwater.
      
      "You just end up with a warmer sea and bigger fish," he says.
    

The reason I think it could become a problem at-scale is, again, because it's
a great idea from an engineering perspective. Cheap land, cheap cooling,
space-efficient (no need for human amenities in the building, like walking
space and bathrooms and security checkpoints). I could imagine a scenario a
decade or two down the road when most of the world's data centers are dumped
off the coasts, at which point there would likely be impact. Setting aside the
heat, there's the widespread disruption of the sea floor. Also, while some
companies might take environmental precautions, I'm sure that others would
not. Why would you bother spending the money to salvage a pod in the case of a
tank breach or a fire?

It's far from the biggest environmental concern we have, and it could be done
with minimal impact if those doing it cared enough, but in my experience large
companies won't go to any expense that doesn't make or save them money.

------
ryanmarsh
Well now we have a plan for boiling the oceans:

Bitcoin mining + underwater data centers

------
floor_
Reminds me of that NOC +10 ARG and the first Bioshock.

------
OnesimusUnbound
What would be its ecological impact?

------
badatusernames
<sarcasm>Haha, Microsoft, you sunk a data center and now you think you can run
Github.</sarcasm>

------
badblade
new snorkelling destination

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jc763
Brilliant.

------
josiahtu
data syncing

------
shoo

      # Full fathom six thy server sits;
      # Of its disks are coral made;
      # Those are pearls that were its bits
      # Nothing of it that doth fade
      # But doth suffer sea-migrations
      # Into substrate for crustaceans.
      # Sea-nymphs monitor system vigour:
      # Hark! HEALTH CHECK: FAILURE -- replacement trigger'd

~~~
jdironman
I'm hiding this in my source code somewhere as we speak. Very well written.

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

FWIW we believe immersion cooling is the most practical approach to reduce
energy needs of hungry data centers and still allow them to be situated where
they are needed and enable the re-usage of heat. As a shameless plug, I am the
co-founder of [https://submer.com](https://submer.com) .

[1] We covered this in our blog ([https://submer.com/microsoft-testing-
undersea-immersion-cool...](https://submer.com/microsoft-testing-undersea-
immersion-cooling/)) [2]
[https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/feb/20/much-
wor...](https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/feb/20/much-work-needed-
to-make-digital-economy-environmentally-sustainable)

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

~~~
polvs
Hi Tom, I think I remember you from the C3 Crypto Conference where we had a
booth. I know what you mean, the initial cost of acquiring this technology
compared to regular air cooling technologies is more expensive in the very
short term, but when you consider the operational costs of electricity, the
ROI can be under a year.

It becomes much more interesting when you also factor in that you can pack >4x
computing power into the same physical space saving a lot of real estate and
don't need the huge CAPEX in expensive prepared server rooms nor plan ahead
the “hot-spots”.

~~~
ksec
Why hasn't this taken up pace though? I am pretty sure I read about immersive
cooling at least 4 -5 years ago. And 3M had some new "liquid" shown 1 - 2
years ago. Given the scale of which now Google, Amazon, Microsoft and Apple
operate, surely they should be the first one to adopt?

Edit:

Looks like I asked the question a while ago. From Anandtech and Servethehome:

10 years ago, liquid had a thermal limit. Now it is around 5x that old limit.
Problem is cost ($$$/gallon of the liquid) and installation. Has to be
marketed on TCO. Also, issues with submerged fiber connections

2U air cooling can reliably handle 8x 200w+ TDP CPUs, 600w of NVMe, plus RAM
and add-in cards. 4U designs can handle 6kW of cooling on air. Liquid may be
more efficient, and more data centers are being built for it, but air is easy
to deploy.

------
senectus1
2016 article... but still cool!

*edit, no its not, I have too many tabs open and mixed it up with the blog post listed in the comments. ignore me

~~~
scaryclam
I think you may be thinking of something else. This was posted today, an hour
ago, on the BBC.

~~~
rosege
Im pretty sure I heard about this a couple of years ago too

~~~
fowie
They did a mini-version in the US a few years ago, this one is 4x the size and
100x the compute

------
AnnoyingSwede
Bit of clickbate there.. Thought this was about them buying Github ;)

------
jbverschoor
Great, let's boil the planet

~~~
function_seven
That's what they're looking to avoid, by using passive cooling instead of less
efficient refrigeration.

------
sbhn
Seems like a good way to create a new country. The country of Microsoft. Go
easy on me down voters, I’m just imagining it from the perspective of China,
Russia, North Korea, Syria, Iran, Cuba, Libya or Canada doing the same thing
and the controversy that would follow.

------
thedancollins
For years we've used water to cool our CPUs ... what happens if we drop the
entire datacenter into water?

~~~
chrisseaton
Why are you just restating the question of the article?

