[Beowulf] Project Natick

[Prentice Bisbal]

I heard about this on BBC World News this morning on my way into work. I 
waas going to share this here myself this morning.

What isn't clear is how the heat is being transferred from the CPUs to 
the seawater. My best guess at the moment is that the capsule's steel 
walls conduct heat from the hot air (nitrogen gas, actually), to the 
seawater, cooling the ambient "air", and then the air is circulated just 
using the chassis fans. It's  possible there are some supplemental fans 
to circulate air around the capsule, but based on the photos of the 
racks being loaded into the capsule, it doesn't look like there'd be 
much room for that. This would mean the processors are still air-cooled 
themselves.

Has anybody seen any more details on how the cooling actually occurs 
withing the capsule?

What is interesting is that these servers are all equipped with FPGAs:

>
>         Payload
>
> 12 racks containing 864 standard Microsoft datacenter servers with 
> FPGA acceleration and 27.6 petabytes of disk. This Natick datacenter 
> is as powerful as several thousand high end consumer PCs and has 
> enough storage for about 5 million movies. 

Since they are equipped with FPGAs, it doesn't sound like they're doing 
routine workloads, so this technique might not be transferable to you or 
me. I'm assuming the FPGAs will get much better performance per watt 
than a general processor, reducing the heatload in the capsule vs. doing 
the same workload with only x86 processors. Does any one know what the 
intended workload of this system is?

On 06/06/2018 08:16 AM, John Hearns via Beowulf wrote:
> https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-44368813
>
> https://natick.research.microsoft.com/
>
> I must admit my first thoughts on hearing an item about this on Radio 
> Scotland is that now that humans have laid waste to the surface of the 
> Earth we are going to boil the oceans.
> My second thought is for the poor HPC engineer who will have to be 
> equipped with a wetsuit and fins to do maintenance.
>
> Actually looks like Microsoft have very sensibly filled the thing with 
> a dried nitrogen gas, which makes a lot of sense. And it is supposed 
> to be maintenance free, I would imagine any degraded servers will just 
> be switched off.
>
> Prof Ian Bitterlin says "You just end up with a warmer sea and bigger 
> fish,"
> I have told the tale on here before about the town I grew up in which 
> had a huge Singer factory. The factory had its own power station which 
> discharged hot water into the local canal. The canal was famous for 
> having foot long goldfish.
>
>
>
>
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