[Beowulf] Underwater data centers -- the future?

[Nathan Moore]

A few years ago one of the fission reactors in Minnesota had to abruptly go
down for unscheduled maintenance.  This happened in the middle of the
winter, and the part of the Mississippi river where the cooling water
discharge entered rapidly dropped temperature (assuming dT~25degF).  There
was a large fishkill and the Department of Natural Resources levied a large
fine against the electrical utility.

It seems ironic that the DNR fines the utility for NOT dumping heat into
the water.



On Fri, Sep 9, 2016 at 6:20 AM, Tim Cutts <tjrc at sanger.ac.uk> wrote:

> 1. We already do this for nuclear and other power stations.  I remember
> visiting Fawley, an old oil fired power station in the UK, back in about
> 1982.  Its cooling water was taken from and returned to the Solent.  The
> increased temperature of the water made it ideal for growing oysters, and a
> commercial oyster farm was set up around the water outlet.  Presumably now
> defunct, since oil fired electricity generation hasn't been economical
> since 1974…
> 2. Surely, we heat up the oceans regardless of whether it's directly by
> cooling with the sea or indirectly by cooling in air, and atmospheric
> warming slowly warming the oceans.  Ultimately it will all come to
> equilibrium (with possible disastrous consequences) whichever way we do
> it.  There was quite a nice point made in the late David MacKay's book
> pointing out that  it doesn't really matter even if we found an abundant
> source of almost free energy; the atmosphere still has a finite surface
> area from which to radiate the waste heat to space, which imposes a
> significant upper limit on how much power the human race can safely use.
>
> Tim
>
> --
> Head of Scientific Computing
>
> Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute
>
> On 07/09/2016, 15:06, "Beowulf on behalf of Andrew Leahy" <
> beowulf-bounces at beowulf.org on behalf of aleahy at knox.edu> wrote:
>
> Listening in on the heated discussion of immersive cooling while I was
> sitting on the shores of Lake Superior this summer, I was reminded of a
> recent NYT article on Microsoft's Project Natick:
>
> http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/01/technology/microsoft-
> plumbs-oceans-depths-to-test-underwater-data-center.html?_r=0
>
> The idea is that you circumvent the cooling problem altogether by
> dumping data centers in the ocean.  I'm curious if anybody has crunched
> the numbers on this idea to see if it makes sense, just from a cooling
> perspective.
>
> Andrew Leahy
>
>
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-- 
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Nathan Moore
Mississippi River and 44th Parallel
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