[Beowulf] Fwd: Project Natick

[Lux, Jim (337K)]

On 6/7/18, 8:27 AM, "Beowulf on behalf of Joe Landman" <beowulf-bounces at beowulf.org on behalf of joe.landman at gmail.com> wrote:

    
    
    On 06/07/2018 11:18 AM, Douglas Eadline wrote:
    >   -snip-
    >> i'm not sure i see a point in all this anyhow, it's a neat science
    >> experiment, but what's the ROI on sinking a container full of servers
    >> vs just pumping cold seawater from 100ft down
    >>
    > I had the same thought. You could even do a salt water/clear water
    > heat exchange and not have the salt water near the servers.
    >
    >  From a risk perspective, failure under 100 ft of sea water
    > would seem to much more catastrophic vs failure on land and
    > cooling with pumped water (maybe I read too much N.N. Taleb).
    
    Imagine 100kW or so ... suddenly discovering that the neat little hole 
    in the pipe enables this highly conductive ionic fluid to short ... 
    somewhere between 1V and 12V DC.  10's to 100's of thousands of Amps.  I 
    wouldn't wanna be anywhere near that when it lets go.
    


Ahem, that is NOT the use case this kind of capability is aiming at. You're right - pumps and pipes and hoses are cheaper. If you're close to the coastline. What if you want your "datacenter" somewhere on a line between Iceland and the Hebrides. (sorry, I just re-read Hunt for Red October on a long plane flight)