[Beowulf] Project Natick

[Lawrence Stewart]

> On 2018, Jun 6, at 9:13 PM, Chris Samuel <chris at csamuel.org> wrote:
> 
> On Thursday, 7 June 2018 12:34:54 AM AEST Prentice Bisbal wrote:
> 
>> Has anybody seen any more details on how the cooling actually occurs withing
>> the capsule?
> 
> There's a bit more here:
> 
> https://datacenterfrontier.com/the-watery-edge-microsoft-deploys-undersea-servers-in-scotland/
> 
> # A key change from the prototype was in the cooling system, where Naval Group
> # adapted a heat-exchange process commonly used for cooling submarines,
> # piping seawater directly through the radiators on the back of each of the 12
> # server racks and back out into the ocean.
> 
> So water cooled doors, but presumably hardened against the corrosive
> properties of sea water?
> 
>> What is interesting is that these servers are all equipped with FPGAs:
> 
> Going after the bitcoin crowd perhaps?

Microsoft has been interested in FPGAs for datacenters for years.  The work is quite interesting and a review link is https://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=3231573 <https://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=3231573>
They use it for search acceleration, among other things.
Other purposes i’ve heard about include a place to keep customer crypto keys inaccessible to the service operator, and yes, making the hardware available to customers.

> 
> cheers,
> Chris
> -- 
> Chris Samuel  :  http://www.csamuel.org/  :  Melbourne, VIC
> 
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