[Beowulf] More about those underwater data centers

[John Hearns]

> 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.

Something like this perhaps?
https://youtu.be/0gCXfWCLZAA





On Mon, 5 Nov 2018 at 16:01, Prentice Bisbal via Beowulf <
beowulf at beowulf.org> wrote:

> 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> 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
>
>
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