Microsoft are looking at putting datacenters under the ocean, which sounds like a really good idea to cool them but I can’t help but think a couple decades from now it’s going to start causing us problems

  • LongbottomLeaf@lemmy.nz
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    1 year ago

    > The system pipes seawater directly through the radiators on the back of each of the 12 server racks and back out into the ocean.

    How much is it going to heat the local area? Along with disk and rack design testing, are they also testing how this thing affects wildlife?

    The appeal is understandable: proximity to population centers, temperature, security, scaling with renewable tech, etc.

    I wonder if international waters is their end goal. Self-reliant, off-grid data centers that only abide by MS rules.

    • RickRussell_CA@beehaw.org
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      1 year ago

      Everything has to be cooled, it’s a question of efficiency. Directly exchanging the heat into cold water is arguably better than expending fossil fuels to generate electricity to pump the heat out of your servers and into the atmosphere. You get multiple losses with current technology: fossil fuel efficiency losses, electric line losses, air conditioning efficiency losses. And the additional electrical generation dumps more CO2.

      • LongbottomLeaf@lemmy.nz
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        1 year ago

        Oh no doubt. It makes a great deal of sense.

        I’m just curious what the actual heat output is (avg, min, max, in vs out), and what the environmental impact is.

        Will there be biofouling because the warm seawater is desirable?

        Will it even be viable offshore from places like Miami?

        Can it produce too much heat for the local environment? Probably not one, but what about after this scale-up with renewables like the article mentions?

        At what scale would it begin to disrupt things like the AMOC?

    • shagie@programming.dev
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      1 year ago

      > I wonder if international waters is their end goal. Self-reliant, off-grid data centers that only abide by MS rules.

      Reduction of power requirements.

      https://dataspan.com/blog/how-much-energy-do-data-centers-use/

      > For many data centers, the cooling system is one of the most energy-intensive components in the facility. The average data center cooling system consumes about 40% of the center’s total power.

      Further reading:

      From nrel.gov (National Renewable Energy Lab) site:

      > When the Energy Systems Integration Facility (ESIF) was conceived, NREL set an aggressive requirement that its data center achieve an annualized average power usage effectiveness (PUE) of 1.06 or better. Since the facility opened, this goal has been met every year—and the data center has now achieved an annualized PUE rating of 1.036.

      > Studies show a wide range of PUE values for data centers, but the overall average tends to be around 1.8. Data centers focusing on efficiency typically achieve PUE values of 1.2 or less. PUE is the ratio of the total amount of power used by a computer data center facility to the power delivered to computing equipment.

      (I wanna say that 1.036 for PUE is amazing - but all the stuff they did to get there is expensive)