
Project Natick: Microsoft's Underwater Data Center - Qworg
http://www.projectnatick.com/
======
steckerbrett
> 50% OF US LIVE NEAR THE COAST. WHY DOESN'T OUR DATA?

It's corrosive, expensive to get things to and from it for replacement, leaks
destroy the hardware, it's not close to power generation, internet access
needs cables because RF doesn't penetrate water, everything is going need
watercooling which is rather expensive.

~~~
hobs
Imagining they completely solve the problem of sea water, leaks, etc, it still
is amazing to think that you would want to do your server maint by pulling a
data center out of the ocean on a boat and replacing hard drives and the like.

The only way this makes sense to me is if there is the ability to create
something akin to the cargo container as a building block of a data center,
where you can have arbitrary compute and storage plug into a greater complex.

~~~
BinaryIdiot
Sounds like that's exactly what they want to do: they would only pull them out
of the water every 5 years to do computer replacements / maintenance. If some
components fail then who cares. They wouldn't do a full rebuild for 20 years.

~~~
winfred
I worked in large data centers before and I just don't see how this can be
done practically. Data centers require quite a bit of physical maintenance.

Every computer design has some element that will render a large part of the
design inoperable in case of failure. Either it is a SAN head (even if you
have two, the fail over can malfunction), or a switch setup.

Then there are things like failures of simultaneously purchased components
(hard drives purchased at the same time, that are worked the same load will
roughly fail at the time).

~~~
andrewvc
Cloud datacenters are not complex heterogeneous mixes of components. There's
no SAN head. It's one thing multiplied + some networking gear. Even if a top
of rack switch fails they're still not going to yank the box yet because the
TCO will be lowered by too much maintenance at this scale. They wait for their
maint interval and fix everything at once (or just upgrade the hardware).

------
YesProcrast
A clever idea. People are wondering why such a thing might be useful, so let
me advance a theory:

Latency.

Suppose you have a bunch of people somewhere, say, the US, and a bunch of
other people somewhere else, say, China, and there's an ocean in between. If
they need to work collaboratively on something, placing a datacenter in one
country or the other yields asymmetric latency; someone has a lot more.

If you can just plop a datacenter exactly at the midpoint, everyone wins. It
needn't be the biggest datacenter ever, just one that can handle the latency-
sensitive tasks.

Neat project.

~~~
jimrandomh
More likely it's to reconcile latency requirements with national borders. If
you want to be close to a country to offer low latency, but political or legal
or tax reasons mean you don't want to be _in_ that country, then an ocean
datacenter can get you close enough.

~~~
esya
Hint hint - China! Those damn ICP licenses!

------
krick
Speaking about effectiveness and stuff: I am still amazed how these modern
bootstrapy landing pages, that, in this particular case, basically contain
nothing more than text and a couple of pictures, can make browser noticeably
slower. I mean, yeah, it works, can be built quickly and, since users are used
to it — nobody really complains. If it would be some yet another tiny startup,
I wouldn't even bother to comment.

But when it's a landing for some futuristic Microsoft project, which is about
doing significant work to achieve relatively small improvement in something,
and which is very likely to be non-environmentally-friendly… Really, just look
at it. Enjoy how scrolling up and down makes your browser lag. And then look
at the source. Just marvelous.

~~~
vayeate
It's rendered entirely with JavaScript, has images (and gifs), and an iframe
with a Bing map on it, some sort of plugin for "Azure Media Player", and it
appears to also have some scrolling-based JavaScript. It's a good example of
an obese website:
[http://idlewords.com/talks/website_obesity.htm](http://idlewords.com/talks/website_obesity.htm)

------
doublerebel
Cooling data centers with seawater is not new, Google has been doing it since
at least 2011. There are many ways to mitigate the corrosive effects on the
equipment. "For instance, Interxion uses materials like Cunifer and titanium,
which will last approximately 10 years in seawater." [1]

There also are many tried and true ways to manage the heated water so that it
is safe for the environment [1, 2].

"We pump that seawater through cooling modules - which are direct water to
water heat exchange modules - and then the water is gravity fed from the
cooling modules back out to a temporary building, which serves the purpose of
mixing incoming seawater with outgoing return water, so when we return the
water to the Gulf it is at a temperature more similar to the incoming water."
[2].

I'm sure Microsoft was aware of all this before publishing their report. Good
on them for thinking creatively.

[1]: [http://www.datacenterjournal.com/industry-perspective-
seawat...](http://www.datacenterjournal.com/industry-perspective-seawater-
cool-data-center/)

[2]: [http://www.datacenterdynamics.com/power-cooling/googles-
finl...](http://www.datacenterdynamics.com/power-cooling/googles-finland-data-
center-pioneers-new-seawater-cooling/32932.fullarticle)

~~~
cm2187
Can't all the pipes and valves be made of plastic?

~~~
dogma1138
Sea water decomposes plastic faster than it corrodes metal. This is one of the
issues with plastic pollution of the oceans they break down release nasty
chemicals and end up as micro plastics.

Most plastics will decompose under a year in the oceans turning it into soup
basically.
[http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2009/08/090820-plast...](http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2009/08/090820-plastic-
decomposes-oceans-seas.html)

~~~
mhandley
Interesting - I didn't know that. But the article you cite says it only really
happens in tropical waters above 30C (86F). Is there evidence plastic
decomposes in sea water in cooler climates?

~~~
cm2187
By definition if the water is used for cooling, it will be warmed up when
flowing through the datacenter.

But you could use sea water just a secondary cooling system, with non sea
water flowing through the datacentre and a heat exchange between the two.

------
mmel
The main advantage I would think that is not mentioned is mitigating the price
of real estate in expensive regions like Hong Kong, New York, San Francisco
etc.

~~~
jorangreef
I came here to say the same. Cities with expensive real estate are often the
cities where latency matters even more. This is essentially a datacenter that
can be dropped in the ocean, rent-free.

------
RyJones
Natick is a town in Massachusetts, as the FAQ says; it's also the home of
Natick Labs, which over the years has done interesting R&D.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Army_Natick_Sold...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Army_Natick_Soldier_Research,_Development_and_Engineering_Center)

ETA: that's what I get for typing mindlessly instead of cutting and pasting.

~~~
jolux
Massachusetts, not Maryland. I live right next door to Natick. Read that
Wikipedia article more carefully.

------
dang
See also [http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/01/technology/microsoft-
plumb...](http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/01/technology/microsoft-plumbs-
oceans-depths-to-test-underwater-data-center.html) (via
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11008851](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11008851)).

Since the current post is more of an original source and is currently ranked
higher on the front page, we treated that one as the dupe and merged its
comments here.

------
cjfont
I'm still not sure why one would want to place the data center at the bottom
of the ocean. I would think that the disadvantage of not being able to perform
maintenance for 5 years would be more significant -- can't they just create
the data center near a water source and pump the water through pipes that run
across a heat exchange on the backside of the servers?

~~~
m_mueller
Your idea is what's being done at the largest computing center in Switzerland,
the CSCS. They pump water from the relatively deep Lake Lugano [1]. Europe's
currently fastest supercomputer (world No. 7) is hosted there.

[1]
[http://www.cscs.ch/cscs/an_innovative_centre/cooling_system/...](http://www.cscs.ch/cscs/an_innovative_centre/cooling_system/index.html)

[2]
[http://www.top500.org/lists/2015/11/](http://www.top500.org/lists/2015/11/)

------
fiatmoney
It seems like putting this in freshwater would help with a lot of issues. A
data center in say Lake Huron gets you relatively low latency access to a lot
of US & Canadian population. Putting it in an artificially dammed lake on a
river gives you free-ish power & cooling (and probably population proximity as
well, since river-side areas tend to be densely populated).

------
whalesalad
Talk about a Digital Ocean.

------
rdl
It would be pretty amazing to put servers undersea in the _middle of an ocean_
for transaction efficiency reasons -- say between NYC and LON directly on the
straight line path.

The crazy thing is there probably are financial market applications/HFT where
having processing power exactly equidistant between to market centers with the
most efficient path would make sense. (Running microwave instead of fiber, to
get 1c vs. 2/3c, would also be interesting, but there are different
engineering challenges there.)

Amazed Microsoft didn't mention this.

------
malloryerik
Sure, some heat will be added to the ocean. But land-based data centers add
heat to the environment and also need to be air conditioned.

One question, what happens when there's a tsunami?

This is a particularly relevant question on the US west coast:
[http://www.newyorker.com/tech/elements/how-to-stay-safe-
when...](http://www.newyorker.com/tech/elements/how-to-stay-safe-when-the-big-
one-comes)

~~~
rtkwe
A tsunami would have relatively little effect on a pod suspended/anchored to
the sea floor. They only get violent when they reach the shallows and come
onto land. It'd have more effect on the shore connection point where the data
and power go into the ocean. These could be buried up to the shore though and
anything above ground secured in a sealed bunker though that doesn't solve the
problem of keeping the pods powered through the power outage after a tsunami.

~~~
malloryerik
That's somewhat reassuring (there's thought to be a 12% chance of a Cascadia
mega-quake and accompanying west coast tsunami in the next twenty years).

~~~
rtkwe
Yeah the main factor in how much will a large wave or tsunami affect a
structure at sea is how deep is the water the object is in. Out in the deep
ocean the surface swell is less than a meter and the wavelength is huge (200
km or so long) so the change is relatively gentle and gets subtler as you get
deeper. It's really neat.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsunami#Characteristics](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsunami#Characteristics)

------
Qworg
OP here (and member of the Project Natick team) - the site has been updated
with our video, and there's now a blog post with some more information:
[http://news.microsoft.com/features/microsoft-research-
projec...](http://news.microsoft.com/features/microsoft-research-project-puts-
cloud-in-ocean-for-the-first-time/)

------
sandworm101
I don't get it. If this is all about heat, I would think that putting the data
center _beside_ the ocean and then pumping seawater around to cool things
would be far easier than sinking the entire kit. Even if they really really
want to be underwater, I'd assume digging an artificial lake and pumping water
in and out would be easier than dealing with an actual ocean.

~~~
ihsw
Eh, I think it's indeed more of an intellectual curiosity than anything else,
but personally I cannot support enough our encroachment on the ocean. It truly
is the last frontier on the surface of the Earth that we have yet to reliably
explore.

Autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) have a lot more potential to expand our
understanding of this planet and I think it is exciting. Just because we can't
go there doesn't mean we can't tap into its power.

At the risk of sounding like a BBC documentary, the oceans are the engine of
this planet and they deserve to be investigated thoroughly.

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

------
deftnerd
At first I was concerned that there would be so much humidity inside of the
capsule from the condensation caused by the temperature difference between the
outside and the inside, but I see they've addressed that by replacing the
atmosphere with Nitrogen.

I wonder if they've considered an inert fluid to immerse the computers in? If
you can use something like Fluorinert, or even high-grade mineral oil, you
might be able to make the vessel not required to withstand crush forces as
high since the fluid in the capsule can be at the same pressures.

I do love this idea because they can start putting data centers along of
submarine cables. One in the middle of the Atlantic, between London and NYC
would be great for HFT traders.

I wouldn't be surprised if the NSA wouldn't love something like this too. A
whole data center on cross-oceanic cables would provide a lot of
infrastructure they can use to analyze traffic in real-time.

~~~
vectorjohn
I'm not sure what nitrogen has to do with humidity. I don't think anything. If
humidity was the problem there are other ways to deal with it (the water
doesn't come from nowhere, and once it's gone, you won't get any condensation
anymore).

Sounds like (pressurized) nitrogen had more to do with increasing the air
density for heat transfer. But I still don't know why they chose nitrogen.

~~~
ihsw
Yeah I'm not sure what it has to do with it either, desiccants[1] are nothing
new and they are the standard when it comes to humidity reduction in shipping.
You might be familiar with those little packets of silica beads in foods and
computer components that say "DO NOT EAT" on them.

That said, nitrogen-refrigeration is commonly used for temperature control.

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

------
frik
Changing the water temperature locally more than a few degrees has bad effects
for the environment. Keep that in mind.

~~~
krick
First thought as well. I mean, those datacenters on land also are pretty bad
(especially compared to how "useful" they are in the most common cases), but
that thing in the sea is somehow a bit more scary for several reasons.

But then I'm thinking: there are volcanos deep in the ocean, and life around
them is surely different than in colder areas, but it doesn't seem to have
much impact on larger area. It surely depends a lot on _where_ you place your
datacenter, but, theoretically, it should be possible to make it harmless.

The other thing is that of course tech giants placing their datacenters under
the water won't care a bit about correct placing, and in the end there won't
be anyone to stop them.

------
antmldr
Data Sovereignty? Could this, for better or for worse, allow Microsoft to
completely dictate the terms of how it stores and manages its data in
international waters?

~~~
fiatmoney
Ha. In "international waters", you're at the mercy of whomever has the
strongest navy - usually that means to USA. Especially when they can make an
at-all-plausible case that you're in some sense US-flagged.

------
kordless
> 50% OF US LIVE NEAR THE COAST. WHY DOESN'T OUR DATA?

Regardless of the effort and results, I think they should reconsider putting
an illogical and patently false statement at the header of this article in
attempt to gain interest about it.

Some of my data, or more specifically "my data" lives in my house, in servers
in my garage. While the collaborative argument has some merit in proposing
splitting latency differences, I think the vast majority of "our data" should
end up living near where we are.

That results in a better question to ask, and that's "Why do people tend to
put their data where they don't live?" Following, one may ask "Are there valid
business models that can be created to help people put their data near where
they live?"

------
late2part
Microsoft loves to hype these things; remember container data centers? It all
makes for nice reading, but I suspect their TCO is crap.

------
zmanian
When the USS Jimmy Carter[1] splices an intercept into an undersea fiber optic
cable it probably leaves something similar to this behind of locally filter
the data and only uplink relevant data.

Makes you wonder what vendors the Navy uses and if MSFT is using the same.

[1] [http://www.nytimes.com/2005/02/20/politics/new-nuclear-
sub-i...](http://www.nytimes.com/2005/02/20/politics/new-nuclear-sub-is-said-
to-have-special-eavesdropping-ability.html)

------
codeddesign
I'm surprised that no one has commented at all on climate change. Having a
data center in a body of water would surely heat up that body of water to a
certain extent - even if it's just the surrounding area which can cause
dramatic effects to the water, life, and relative climate/weather patterns.

------
wpeterson
This is a nice PR piece but building operational systems in a marine
environment usually requires hardy engineering, equipment, and constant
maintenance. It's not a friendly environment.

I can't see the benefits here, if they want water cooling colocation with
hydro-electric or other freshwater flows seem much better.

------
dogma1138
Would be quite interesting to see what exactly comes out of this.

If the datacenter will be located in international waters it can pretty much
chose the country which it belongs to as it will have to sail under a flag
(this effects stationary ojbects also e.g. oil rigs in international waters).

Now every country can claim upto 200KM as their exclusive economical waters so
it will still be under the jurisdiction of the country to which those waters
belong to unless MSFT plans to really put the datacenter in the deep ocean.

On the side and more hilarious note if anyone hacks a datacenter in
international waters they've technically committed piracy so I wonder how will
this effect the NSA :D Although the downside of this is that countries can
board and search vessels under the laws of the sea quite easily if they are in
international waters.

------
secstate
Ha. With the project name, I somehow kept expecting this thing to be off the
coast of Boston. Took me a while to realize it was off the West Coast :)

------
quanticle
Given how much heat racks of servers on land generate, I don't understand how
they can claim that there is no heat being added to the ocean.

~~~
smoyer
I came here to say exactly the same thing ... it requires a lot more calories
to heat up water one degree Celsius than it does air but the heat still has to
go somewhere.

~~~
nemothekid
An interesting question would be, how much heat do all of the world
datacenters produce and how much energy would it take to raise the average
temperature of the Ocean by 1 degree?

~~~
tlb
The world's oceans contain 1,335,000,000 km^3 of water. Heat capacity is 4.2
KJ / liter / C. So it requires 5.6e24 joules to heat the oceans by 1 C.

The world generates 20,000 TWh of electricity per year, and maybe 10% is for
IT. That's 7.2e18 joules of electricity / year in IT.

So it would take 780,000 years to heat by 1 C. Or 780 years to heat by 0.001
C.

Other sources of global warming are far, far worse.

~~~
quanticle
The problem I'm concerned about isn't raising the average temperature of the
ocean. The problem I'm concerned about is localized heating. Marine life is
far more vulnerable to rapid temperature changes than life on land. We've seen
dead zones developing in the past downstream of power-plants, as the warm
water discharge from the steam turbines raises the temperature of the water
and reduces its oxygen carrying capability. My concern is that if we put
datacenters in the ocean, they'll create localized hot-spots with much the
same result.

------
akshatpradhan
>Project Natick reflects Microsoft’s ongoing quest for cloud datacenter
solutions that offer rapid provisioning, lower costs, high responsiveness, and
are more environmentally sustainable.

I don't understand how an underwater data center would help with that

>The vision of operating containerized datacenters offshore near major
population centers anticipates a highly interactive future requiring data
resources located close to users. Deepwater deployment offers ready access to
cooling, renewable power sources, and a controlled environment.

I don't understand why that needs to be done in an underwater data center.

>Enables rapid response to market demand, quick deployment for natural
disasters and special events such as World Cup.

I don't understand how an underwater data center solves that.

>Latency is how long it takes data to travel between its source and
destination. Half of the world’s population lives within 200 km of the ocean
so placing datacenters offshore increases the proximity of the datacenter to
the population dramatically reducing latency and providing better
responsiveness.

Let's imagine you throw an underwater data center in the middle of the
Mediterranean Sea to provide access to everybody. How is that more
advantageous to just building the data center on one of the islands?

Overall, I guess I don't understand why we need an underwater data center,
like at all. Is it mostly because of advanced cooling capability?

------
n0us
[http://www.amazon.com/Avogadro-Corp-Singularity-Closer-
Appea...](http://www.amazon.com/Avogadro-Corp-Singularity-Closer-Appears-
ebook/dp/B006ACIMQQ)

This reminds me of a book I read recently in which they put the servers on
barges. I was an entertaining read, 1/1 would recommend.

------
uglysexy
Microsoft trying to be relevant/interesting. This is worse than Zune. I just
might short MSFT tomorrow morning.

> you have a bunch of people somewhere, say, the US, and a bunch of other
> people somewhere else, say, China > If you can just plop a datacenter
> exactly at the midpoint

That would be Hawaii

------
JorgeGT
Somewhat unrelated, but nice endorsement of Grafana!
[http://www.projectnatick.com/images/gifs/grafanaloop.gif](http://www.projectnatick.com/images/gifs/grafanaloop.gif)

------
TranquilMarmot
The "Leona Philpot"? Surely a reference to the "I Love Bees" ARG for Halo 2?

[http://halo.wikia.com/wiki/Leona_Philpot](http://halo.wikia.com/wiki/Leona_Philpot)

~~~
taspeotis
> "The first prototype, affectionately named Leona Philpot — a character in
> Microsoft’s Halo video game series..."

~~~
TranquilMarmot
Oh... I should really pay more attention :)

------
porker
With the layoffs in the oil exploration industry and the knock-on effects for
engineering firms who helped with undersea exploration this is great timing
from Microsoft.

Cheaper labour/costs to pick up the technology needed.

------
rottyguy
Would putting a big data center underground work? (ala geothermal cooling?)

~~~
eru
You've heard of geothermal heating?

Of course, the ground can be reasonable cool, if you don't go too deep. The
problem is, the heat will mostly stay where you put it---the ground is bad for
actually moving the heat away.

~~~
rottyguy
IIRC, in geothermal cooling, don't they pipe liquid to disperse the heat to
the surrounding ground? Also, earth homes?

------
cm2187
What I don't get is how do you swap a disk? A datacentre requires pretty much
constant maintenance. I guess a robot could swap a disk. But we are talking
about a pretty costly equipment then.

------
zitterbewegung
Is the white paper that they mention on the website publicly available? I
think it would offer more information than the website so people would
understand the rationale for this investigation.

------
matheweis
This sounds like a great idea, kind of. I'd be seriously concerned about the
immediate environmental impact. Otoh, volcanic vents are hotbeds of life, so
maybe it'd be ok.

------
ggsp
Funnily enough, this was sort of predicted in a paper[1], even though the
intended use there would have been HFT.

[1]www.alexwg.org/publications/PhysRevE_82-056104.pdf

------
soulus
Google Earth Amazon Fire Apple Air . . Microsoft Water?

------
udkl
They should think of how to handle security.

There is a risk of not just industrial sabotage, but international espionage &
terrorism.... and of course... Tom Cruise.

------
rbanffy
It sure saves on cooling, but watching someone trying to replace a failed
drive will prove entertaining.

------
kregasaurusrex
Why don't datacenters of scale use a fluid specially designed for heat
dissipation that doesn't damage components like this?
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a6ErbZtpL88](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a6ErbZtpL88)?

------
emiliobumachar
I hate to be the cynical in the room, but this smells like tax avoiding.

------
jmspring
Working for the company, I really really f'n hate this website.

------
eachro
How long till we start putting datacenters in space? 20 years?

~~~
evanb
With no convective medium, the primary cooling mechanism in space is
radiation, making it no so easy to keep computers cool.

------
buzzdenver
MS is misunderstanding what deep learning is :)

------
lossolo
Cooling for free

------
janfeb
Will there be any noise pollution?

------
fowl2
SOMA flashbacks

Watch out for that structure gel!

~~~
pqhwan
Came in here looking for SOMA reference. I'd imagine a data center would sort
of work as its own ARK, though (Not to mention the petabytes of sensitive,
personal, possibly secret documents, pictures and videos for your perusal).

------
snarfy
Seems like a bad idea to dump waste heat into the ocean.

------
leaveyou
the lack of diversity in that team is astounding ! not a single eastern
european there.

------
ceejayoz
I'd imagine the NSA would be pretty happy about this.

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

