[Beowulf] Project Natick

[Tomasz Rola]

On Wed, Jun 06, 2018 at 04:55:03PM +0200, John Hearns via Beowulf wrote:
> Reading into this a bit more on the Microsoft site, the intention is to
> power these things using renewables such as wind or tidal power.
> I've never been to Orkney, but as it famously has no trees ther eis plenty
> of wind I am sure...
> 
> Might make sense actually as they say for remote communities.
> The cynic in me says why in the heck would a remote community NEED 12 or
> more racks of servers, but this wont be for local use.
> It makes sense in terms of having free cost power (OK - I know the true
> cost is the construction of a wind turbine or two) and free cost cooling.
> The total power is 240kW which is a respectable amount of power - not as
> dense as big HPC installations these days, but pretty respectable.

I maybe will read the source article if I find time, but from words of
those who read it, it is basically:

computer + salt water + wind turbine + Microsoft

I suggest it will not go anywhere and is in fact some kind of
marketing stunt.

But I will wait a year and see if there is a reason to change my
opinion.

> One sincerely hopes that if things like this do get deployed in the ocean
> then the steel module, the wind turbine and the servers are recycled at the
> end of life and not just abandoned.

Yeah.

-- 
Regards,
Tomasz Rola

--
** A C programmer asked whether computer had Buddha's nature.      **
** As the answer, master did "rm -rif" on the programmer's home    **
** directory. And then the C programmer became enlightened...      **
**                                                                 **
** Tomasz Rola          mailto:tomasz_rola at bigfoot.com             **