Microsoft finds underwater datacenters are reliable, practical and use energy sustainably

[Jet_ski]

2 hours ago, WereCatf said:

Um, and where do you think the thermal energy from data-centres on land go? It ALL ends up in the environment, one way or another. Thermal energy doesn't magically disappear, that's not how energy works.

There’s less damage when it’s not underwater. Out on land the planet radiates the heat away into space. But if it’s underwater, then it takes a lot longer for the heat to reach the surface and get radiated off the planet.

 

2 hours ago, HerrKaLeu said:

The heat output is insignifikant compared to power plants or other. A 1000 Mw power plant maybe has 1200MW waste heat depending on efficiency. a DC maybe a few hundred kW depending on size. Also, boat motors get cooled with sea water. I bet a cruise ship has several times the power output of a DC. i assume they select a location with some current and not a dead pool to get fresh water. 

 

How come I live in a 500,000 capita metropolis and only get DSL with 25Mbit, but somewhere in the middle of the ocean people have enough bandwidth to run a DC? 

Just because it’s less horrible than power plants doesn’t mean we should go ahead and do it. That’s just not a good logic. Yeah cruise ships are horrendous; each cruise ship outputs more phosphorus than entire Europe. You can google that.

[WereCatf]

2 minutes ago, Jet_ski said:

There’s less damage when it’s not underwater. Out on land the planet radiates the heat away into space. But if it’s underwater, then it takes a lot longer for the heat to reach the surface and get radiated off the planet

A sea has an enormously larger surface-area to dissipate heat from than you can get with any man-made structure.

[CarlBar]

7 minutes ago, Lord Vile said:

Yeah because you're gonna spend hundreds of thousands in equipment to dig up encrypted drives that are worth nothing aside from the data they store, you're also gonna do that quickly enough so that whoever owns the server can't notice it's offline and doesn't it to the police. 

 

Depending whats on those drives, might actually be worth it. It also might not be encrypted on the drives themselves. For that matter the hardware itself might well be valuable enough to steal. I'd also assume they get the cables on and do everything but life it before they cut the power and data lines. That would given the owners less than an hour to figure out somthing was wrong and get someone out to check on things. Odds are at least at first they could get away with it.

[Lord Vile]

7 minutes ago, CarlBar said:

 

Depending whats on those drives, might actually be worth it. It also might not be encrypted on the drives themselves. For that matter the hardware itself might well be valuable enough to steal. I'd also assume they get the cables on and do everything but life it before they cut the power and data lines. That would given the owners less than an hour to figure out somthing was wrong and get someone out to check on things. Odds are at least at first they could get away with it.

Issue is you have to raise it from the seabed slowly or else you get pressure issues and just the weight of the thing itself. Too easy to slap a depth sensor on the things and call it a day.

[CarlBar]

2 minutes ago, Lord Vile said:

Issue is you have to raise it from the seabed slowly or else you get pressure issues and just the weight of the thing itself. Too easy to slap a depth sensor on the things and call it a day.

 

Thats why i said less than an hour, unless they're sinking these in really deep water they should be winch-able inside an hour and if you cut the data and power cable right before you start the lift a depth sensor isn't going to help. Since it's a sealed container i'm not sure pressure would be an issue either.

[GDRRiley]

3 hours ago, HerrKaLeu said:

How come I live in a 500,000 capita metropolis and only get DSL with 25Mbit, but somewhere in the middle of the ocean people have enough bandwidth to run a DC? 

fiber is cheap to run to one place but expensive to get even to just every block.

it took my city running fiber down most of the main roads for AT&T to finally do the last 1/4 mile

[GDRRiley]

11 hours ago, Jet_ski said:

This is an environmental disaster in the making. Besides increasing the water temp, which is going to effect the ecosystem, Microsoft and other companies will abandon these things underwater as soon as they are no longer financially viable to operate.
 

They should instead make their data centers and OS more efficient and output less heat. Purposely heating up the oceans is a terrible idea.

the power output here is insignificant. even with tens of thousands of theses its nothing compared to the suns output
they can't abandon them underwater and if they do you'll be sure they get hell

 

their data centers already are working on that. trying to get below 1.1.

you don't seem to understand the scales here.

[Lord Vile]

4 minutes ago, CarlBar said:

 

Thats why i said less than an hour, unless they're sinking these in really deep water they should be winch-able inside an hour and if you cut the data and power cable right before you start the lift a depth sensor isn't going to help. Since it's a sealed container i'm not sure pressure would be an issue either.

A submarine is sealed and still has depth sensors...

[WereCatf]

4 minutes ago, CarlBar said:

Thats why i said less than an hour, unless they're sinking these in really deep water they should be winch-able inside an hour and if you cut the data and power cable right before you start the lift a depth sensor isn't going to help. Since it's a sealed container i'm not sure pressure would be an issue either.

The Ars Technica - article on this literally says this:

Quote

Both deployment and retrieval of the Northern Isles needed particularly calm weather and a full day of careful work

Notice the part where it says "a full day of careful work"?

[CarlBar]

6 minutes ago, Lord Vile said:

A submarine is sealed and still has depth sensors...

 

We where talking about raising it too fast being an issue vis a vis pressure. Subs are fully capable of doing an emergency surface from near crush depth. They don't have to worry about coming up slow. It's mainly a winching issue in the case of a dead-weight with no flotation capability of it's own as to how fats you can bring it up.

 

6 minutes ago, WereCatf said:

The Ars Technica - article on this literally says this:

Notice the part where it says "a full day of careful work"?

 

They probably didn't want to destroy the cabling. That means a no doubt involved process disconnecting things. Ditto on the divers and everything else. Someone trying to steal it can and will be both more destructive and more sloppy in their methods. Whilst you need a trained diver and a ship with an appropriate crane and lifting capacity from a pure mechanical standpoint it's as simple as sending down a diver and putting 4 cables in the water, get those connected to the 4 anchor points by the diver and then have them cut, (either by hand or with some sort of tool, you might even be able to use a shaped charge if you have the explosive expertise), and start winching.

 

Unless it's in sight of shore till the cable get cut no one's going to know anythings wrong.

[Jet_ski]

12 minutes ago, GDRRiley said:

the power output here is insignificant. even with tens of thousands of theses its nothing compared to the suns output
they can't abandon them underwater and if they do you'll be sure they get hell

 

their data centers already are working on that. trying to get below 1.1.

you don't seem to understand the scales here.

Yeah, the larger the scale the worse. At night most of the heat on the surface is radiated off the planet. But if it’s under water, that process will be slower. Don’t take it from me, look up some science articles about this stuff.

[Doobeedoo]

Next we need to cool nuclear power plant cores in sea.

[wamred]

This seems really promising!

[Lord Vile]

17 minutes ago, CarlBar said:

 

We where talking about raising it too fast being an issue vis a vis pressure. Subs are fully capable of doing an emergency surface from near crush depth. They don't have to worry about coming up slow. It's mainly a winching issue in the case of a dead-weight with no flotation capability of it's own as to how fats you can bring it up.

Depends on the subs and having them be able to do that increases costs. 

 

Having an alert if the depth changes by say 5m more than daily variance would be enough, winching several tons at say 300m takes more time than you'd think. 

[Drama Lama]

17 hours ago, AndreiArgeanu said:

On land, data centers run into issues like corrosion from oxygen and humidity and controlling shifts in temperatures. But in a water-tight environment with tight temperature control, far fewer issues crop up. The idea is that these kinds of servers can be easily deployed in sizes big and small near the coasts of areas that need them, giving better local access to cloud-based resources in more places.

The benefits are big

The AI mastermind needs a safe place.

[jagdtigger]

51 minutes ago, Drama Lama said:

The AI mastermind needs a safe place.

 

[Drama Lama]

Just now, jagdtigger said:

 

Let’s write the coordinates down now and bury them in a time capsule in case the resistance needs them in the future 

just in case 

[Bombastinator]

4 hours ago, Doobeedoo said:

Next we need to cool nuclear power plant cores in sea.

They do that.  There are already more sea based nuclear plants than land based ones, though they tend to be smaller.  Salt becomes an issue.  Tends to cake up.  Plus there’s the aforemtioned fauna.

[Doobeedoo]

41 minutes ago, Bombastinator said:

They do that.  There are already more sea based nuclear plants than land based ones, though they tend to be smaller.  Salt becomes an issue.  Tends to cake up.  Plus there’s the aforemtioned fauna.

Ahh yeah, actually I do remember hearing that it was a thing like a small ones? But oh wow just imagining many huge ones, yikes. 
Like these

[Serin]

I wonder what kind of impact they have on the sea floor.
Be interesting to see if little ecosystems pop up like they tend to around sunken ships. 

[Fatih19]

4 minutes ago, Serin said:

I wonder what kind of impact they have on the sea floor.
Be interesting to see if little ecosystems pop up like they tend to around sunken ships. 

Like how there's an entire ecosystem centered around Black Smokers in the deep sea.

[Trik'Stari]

21 hours ago, Oshino Shinobu said:

When you need a diving license to replace a hard drive. 

Mother****er about to get paaaaaaiiiiiidd.

 

That being said, I'm starting to take issue with the term "sustainability".

 

Per the rules of physics, nothing is sustainable, except maybe entropy (even then, not really?). I'd prefer just saying "more efficient".

[CarlBar]

6 hours ago, Lord Vile said:

Depends on the subs and having them be able to do that increases costs. 

 

Having an alert if the depth changes by say 5m more than daily variance would be enough, winching several tons at say 300m takes more time than you'd think. 

 

But again i'd expect them to cut the data/power cables right before they lift so there isn't going to be any way for it to gt an alert to anything once it starts lifting, (even if it has battery backup to operate the depth sensor). I doubt very much it can be lifted with the cables still attached.

[leadeater]

23 hours ago, Kisai said:

1 - Fire. If something fails and explodes, and takes out the entire unit. Can probably be solved by not having the unit filled with O2 but something else that doesn't burn. 

This is actually already done, they are hypoxic environments in them so do not support fire.

 

23 hours ago, Kisai said:

4 - Must be maintained at large expense , just how long do you think one of those containers will last before it corrodes straight through?

They are designed to be disposable and the intention is not to service them at all other than retrieval and recycling of materials.

[Results45]

Nice.