[Beowulf] More about those underwater data centers

[Prentice Bisbal]

Prentice

On 11/05/2018 06:02 AM, Stu Midgley wrote:
> As far as I can tell, they are just using the salt water to reject the 
> heat to.  How they get the heat from the cpu/hot bits to the water is 
> not clearly stated...
>
> A passive heat exchanger would make energy sense... but would cost a 
> bomb in engineering...  maybe direct fluid cooling (asetek) with a 
> heat-exchanger to the salt water?
>
> Either way, its stupid.  They could just easily pump the cool salt 
> water from the ocean into a DC, reject heat to it using the same 
> methods... and pump it back to the ocean. Since no real delta in 
> height, it would be efficient in energy.
The issue with this would be the increased maintenance cost of the 
equipment pumping the salt water to the the DC, do to the corrosion from 
the salt water, and overall 'dirtiness' of the saltwater. A better 
approach would be to have a closed loop of treated freshwater going from 
the data center to the a heat exchanger submerged in the sea. This 
should reduce maintenance costs for the system.

Honestly, though, I think most of this is moot. With direct-contact 
liquid cooling and warm-water cooling, I think for most data centers, 
cooling to ambient air should be adequate. For places where that isn't 
enough, I would think a shallow, man-made cooling pond on premises would 
be an adequate heat sink, without having to go all the way to the ocean. 
By keeping it shallow, at night when it cools off, the pond could dump a 
lot of its heat to the atmosphere.
>
> OR... just use a boat...
>
>
>
> On Mon, Nov 5, 2018 at 2:27 PM <jaquilina at eagleeyet.net 
> <mailto:jaquilina at eagleeyet.net>> wrote:
>
>     Probably a stupid question here,
>
>     What is the advantage of using salty sea water lets say over for
>     example
>     mineral oil? I have seen on you tube these guys showing that a pc
>     will
>     still run in a fish tank and all components submerged in mineral oil?
>     Yes it will be messier to change components but would the use of
>     mineral
>     oil be more efficient?
>
>
>     On 2018-11-04 14:10, Gerald Henriksen wrote:
>     > On Sat, 3 Nov 2018 18:27:05 +0000, you wrote:
>     >
>     >> I’m not sure there’s a huge population of Xcloud-Xbox gamers in
>     >> Orkney.  There's not much daylight this time of year, of
>     course, so
>     >> maybe that's what those Orcadians are up to.
>     >
>     > Likely just a convenient place for a second test unit.
>     >
>     > In a way this is just an extension of the idea/product Sun came
>     up wth
>     > where they put a datacentre in a shipping container with the
>     idea that
>     > you could quickly get the datacentre where it was needed.
>     >
>     > While I wouldn't say this won't fail, I think there is a lot of
>     > attraction to the concept given not just the time lag do build a
>     > traditional data centre (mentioned in the article), but even the
>     cost
>     > of real estate in many/most places people live these days.  Do you,
>     > for one example, want to pay NYC rents or just throw a bunch of pods
>     > in the Hudson?
>     >
>     > I guess once you accept the idea that we no longer maintain these
>     > datacentres in the traditional way - we now just let hardware
>     fail in
>     > place and ignore it until it's time to replace all the hardware -
>     > moving to smaller sealed units doesn't seem to strange.
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>
> -- 
> Dr Stuart Midgley
> sdm900 at gmail.com <mailto:sdm900 at gmail.com>
>
>
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