12-18-2018, 05:28 AM
WIRED: Undersea servers stay cool while processing oceans of data
<div style="margin: 5px 5% 10px 5%;"><img src="http://www.sickgaming.net/blog/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/wired-undersea-servers-stay-cool-while-processing-oceans-of-data.jpg" width="2400" height="1256" title="" alt="" /></div><div><div><img src="http://www.sickgaming.net/blog/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/wired-undersea-servers-stay-cool-while-processing-oceans-of-data.jpg" class="ff-og-image-inserted" /></div>
<p><span class="lede">Most electronics suffer </span>a debilitating aquaphobia. At the littlest spillage—heaven forbid Dorothy’s bucket—of <a href="https://www.wired.com/tag/water/">water</a>, our wicked widgets shriek and melt.</p>
<p><a href="https://www.wired.com/story/microsoft-undersea-data-server-scotland/wired.com/tag/microsoft">Microsoft</a>, it would seem, missed the memo. Last June, the company installed a smallish data center on a patch of seabed just off the coast of Scotland’s Orkney Islands; around it, approximately 933,333 bucketfuls of brine circulate every hour. As David Wolpert, who studies the thermodynamics of computing systems, wrote in a recent blog post for <em><a href="https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/why-do-computers-use-so-much-energy/" target="_blank">Scientific American</a></em>, “Many people have impugned the rationality.”</p>
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<p class="paywall">The idea to submerge 864 servers in saltwater was, in fact, quite rational, the result of a five-year research project led by future-proofing engineers. Errant liquid might fritz your phone, but the slyer, far deadlier killer of technology is the opposing elemental force, fire. Nearly every system failure in the history of computers has been caused by overheating. As diodes and transistors work harder and get hotter, their susceptibility to degradation intensifies exponentially. Localized, it’s the warm <a href="https://www.wired.com/story/guide-iphone/">iPhone</a> on your cheek or a wheezing laptop giving you upper-leg sweats. At scale, it’s Outlook rendered inoperable by remote server meltdown for 16 excruciating hours—which happened in 2013.</p>
<p class="paywall">Servers underlie the networked world, constantly refreshing the cloud with droplets of <a href="https://www.wired.com/story/us-vs-microsoft-supreme-court-case-data/">data</a>, and they’re as valuable as they are vulnerable. Housed by the hundreds, and often the thousands, in millions of data centers across the United States, they cost billions every year to build and protect. The most significant number, however, might be a single-digit one: Running these machines, and therefore cooling them, blows through an estimated 5 percent of total energy use in the country. Without that power, the cloud burns up and you can’t even fact-check these stats on Google (an operation that costs some server, somewhere, a kilojoule of energy).</p>
<div class="inset-left-component paywall inset-left-component--image">
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<p><i class=" ui-illo icon icon--16" /><cite class="caption-component__credit">Alyssa Foote</cite></p>
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<p class="paywall">Savings of even a few degrees Celsius can significantly extend the lifespan of electronic components; Microsoft reports that, on the ocean floor 117 feet down, its racks stay 10 degrees cooler than their land-based counterparts. Half a year after deployment, “the equipment is happy,” says Ben Cutler, the project’s manager. (The only exceptions are some of the facility’s outward-facing cameras, lately blinded by algal muck.)</p>
<p class="paywall">Another Microsoft employee refers to the effort as “kind of a far-out idea.” But the truth is, most hyperscalers investing in superpowered cloud server farms, from Amazon to Alibaba, see in nature a reliable defense against ever more sophisticated, heat-spewing circuits. Google’s first data center, built in 2006, sits on the temperate banks of Oregon’s Columbia River. In 2013, Facebook opened a warehouse in northern Sweden, where winters average –20 degrees Celsius. The data company Green Mountain buried its massive DC1-Stavenger center inside a Norwegian mountain; pristine, near-freezing water from a fjord, guided by gravity, flows through the cooling system. What Tim Cook has been calling the “data-industrial complex” will rely, if it’s to sustainably expand to the farthest reaches, on a nonindustrial means of survival.</p>
<div class="inset-left-component paywall inset-left-component--image">
<figure class="image-embed-component"><figcaption class="caption-component">
<p><i class=" ui-illo icon icon--16" /><cite class="caption-component__credit">Alyssa Foote</cite></p>
</figcaption></figure>
</div>
<p class="paywall">Underwater centers may represent the next phase, a reverse evolution from land to sea. It’s never been hard, after all, to waterproof large equipment—think of submarines, which get more watertight as they dive deeper and pressure increases. That’s really all Microsoft is doing, swapping out the payloads of people for packets of data and hooking up the trucklong pod to umbilical wiring.</p>
<p class="paywall">Nonetheless, Cutler says, the concept “catches people’s imagination.” He receives enthusiastic emails about his sunken center all the time, including one from a man who builds residential swimming pools. “He was like, you guys could provide the heating for the pools I install!” Cutler says. When pressed on the feasibility of the business model, Cutler adds: “We have not studied this.”</p>
<figure class="image-embed-component"><figcaption class="caption-component">
<p><i class=" ui-illo icon icon--16" /><cite class="caption-component__credit">Alyssa Foote</cite></p>
</figcaption></figure>
<p class="paywall">Others have. IBM maintains a data center outside of Zurich that really does heat a public swimming pool in town, and the Dutch startup Nerdalize will erect a mini green data center in your home with promises of a warm shower and toasty living room. Hyperlocal servers, part of a move toward so-called edge computing, not only provide recyclable energy but also bring the network closer to you, making your connection speeds faster. Microsoft envisions sea-based facilities like the one in Scotland serving population-dense coastal cities all over the world.</p>
<p class="paywall">“I’m not a philosopher, I’m an engineer,” Cutler says, declining to offer any quasipoetic contemplations on the imminent fusion of nature and machine. Still,<br />
he does note the weather on the morning his team hauled the servers out to sea. It was foggy, after a week of clear skies and bright sun—as though the literal cloud, reifying the digital, were peering into the shimmering, unknown depths.</p>
<hr class="paywall" />
<p class="paywall"><strong>Jason Kehe</strong> <em><a href="http://www.twitter.com/jkehe" target="_blank">(@jkehe)</a> wrote about <a href="https://www.wired.com/story/drone-swarms-are-an-illusion-for-now/">drone swarms</a> in issue 26.08</em>.</p>
<p class="paywall"><em>This article appears in the January issue. <a href="https://subscribe.wired.com/subscribe/splits/wired/WIR_Edit_Hardcoded?source=ArticleEnd_CMlink">Subscribe now</a>.</em></p>
<hr class="paywall" />
<h3 class="paywall">More Great WIRED Stories</h3>
</div>
<div style="margin: 5px 5% 10px 5%;"><img src="http://www.sickgaming.net/blog/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/wired-undersea-servers-stay-cool-while-processing-oceans-of-data.jpg" width="2400" height="1256" title="" alt="" /></div><div><div><img src="http://www.sickgaming.net/blog/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/wired-undersea-servers-stay-cool-while-processing-oceans-of-data.jpg" class="ff-og-image-inserted" /></div>
<p><span class="lede">Most electronics suffer </span>a debilitating aquaphobia. At the littlest spillage—heaven forbid Dorothy’s bucket—of <a href="https://www.wired.com/tag/water/">water</a>, our wicked widgets shriek and melt.</p>
<p><a href="https://www.wired.com/story/microsoft-undersea-data-server-scotland/wired.com/tag/microsoft">Microsoft</a>, it would seem, missed the memo. Last June, the company installed a smallish data center on a patch of seabed just off the coast of Scotland’s Orkney Islands; around it, approximately 933,333 bucketfuls of brine circulate every hour. As David Wolpert, who studies the thermodynamics of computing systems, wrote in a recent blog post for <em><a href="https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/why-do-computers-use-so-much-energy/" target="_blank">Scientific American</a></em>, “Many people have impugned the rationality.”</p>
<div class="inset-left-component paywall inset-left-component--article">
<h4 class="inset-left-component__el">Related Stories</h4>
</div>
<p class="paywall">The idea to submerge 864 servers in saltwater was, in fact, quite rational, the result of a five-year research project led by future-proofing engineers. Errant liquid might fritz your phone, but the slyer, far deadlier killer of technology is the opposing elemental force, fire. Nearly every system failure in the history of computers has been caused by overheating. As diodes and transistors work harder and get hotter, their susceptibility to degradation intensifies exponentially. Localized, it’s the warm <a href="https://www.wired.com/story/guide-iphone/">iPhone</a> on your cheek or a wheezing laptop giving you upper-leg sweats. At scale, it’s Outlook rendered inoperable by remote server meltdown for 16 excruciating hours—which happened in 2013.</p>
<p class="paywall">Servers underlie the networked world, constantly refreshing the cloud with droplets of <a href="https://www.wired.com/story/us-vs-microsoft-supreme-court-case-data/">data</a>, and they’re as valuable as they are vulnerable. Housed by the hundreds, and often the thousands, in millions of data centers across the United States, they cost billions every year to build and protect. The most significant number, however, might be a single-digit one: Running these machines, and therefore cooling them, blows through an estimated 5 percent of total energy use in the country. Without that power, the cloud burns up and you can’t even fact-check these stats on Google (an operation that costs some server, somewhere, a kilojoule of energy).</p>
<div class="inset-left-component paywall inset-left-component--image">
<figure class="image-embed-component"><figcaption class="caption-component">
<p><i class=" ui-illo icon icon--16" /><cite class="caption-component__credit">Alyssa Foote</cite></p>
</figcaption></figure>
</div>
<p class="paywall">Savings of even a few degrees Celsius can significantly extend the lifespan of electronic components; Microsoft reports that, on the ocean floor 117 feet down, its racks stay 10 degrees cooler than their land-based counterparts. Half a year after deployment, “the equipment is happy,” says Ben Cutler, the project’s manager. (The only exceptions are some of the facility’s outward-facing cameras, lately blinded by algal muck.)</p>
<p class="paywall">Another Microsoft employee refers to the effort as “kind of a far-out idea.” But the truth is, most hyperscalers investing in superpowered cloud server farms, from Amazon to Alibaba, see in nature a reliable defense against ever more sophisticated, heat-spewing circuits. Google’s first data center, built in 2006, sits on the temperate banks of Oregon’s Columbia River. In 2013, Facebook opened a warehouse in northern Sweden, where winters average –20 degrees Celsius. The data company Green Mountain buried its massive DC1-Stavenger center inside a Norwegian mountain; pristine, near-freezing water from a fjord, guided by gravity, flows through the cooling system. What Tim Cook has been calling the “data-industrial complex” will rely, if it’s to sustainably expand to the farthest reaches, on a nonindustrial means of survival.</p>
<div class="inset-left-component paywall inset-left-component--image">
<figure class="image-embed-component"><figcaption class="caption-component">
<p><i class=" ui-illo icon icon--16" /><cite class="caption-component__credit">Alyssa Foote</cite></p>
</figcaption></figure>
</div>
<p class="paywall">Underwater centers may represent the next phase, a reverse evolution from land to sea. It’s never been hard, after all, to waterproof large equipment—think of submarines, which get more watertight as they dive deeper and pressure increases. That’s really all Microsoft is doing, swapping out the payloads of people for packets of data and hooking up the trucklong pod to umbilical wiring.</p>
<p class="paywall">Nonetheless, Cutler says, the concept “catches people’s imagination.” He receives enthusiastic emails about his sunken center all the time, including one from a man who builds residential swimming pools. “He was like, you guys could provide the heating for the pools I install!” Cutler says. When pressed on the feasibility of the business model, Cutler adds: “We have not studied this.”</p>
<figure class="image-embed-component"><figcaption class="caption-component">
<p><i class=" ui-illo icon icon--16" /><cite class="caption-component__credit">Alyssa Foote</cite></p>
</figcaption></figure>
<p class="paywall">Others have. IBM maintains a data center outside of Zurich that really does heat a public swimming pool in town, and the Dutch startup Nerdalize will erect a mini green data center in your home with promises of a warm shower and toasty living room. Hyperlocal servers, part of a move toward so-called edge computing, not only provide recyclable energy but also bring the network closer to you, making your connection speeds faster. Microsoft envisions sea-based facilities like the one in Scotland serving population-dense coastal cities all over the world.</p>
<p class="paywall">“I’m not a philosopher, I’m an engineer,” Cutler says, declining to offer any quasipoetic contemplations on the imminent fusion of nature and machine. Still,<br />
he does note the weather on the morning his team hauled the servers out to sea. It was foggy, after a week of clear skies and bright sun—as though the literal cloud, reifying the digital, were peering into the shimmering, unknown depths.</p>
<hr class="paywall" />
<p class="paywall"><strong>Jason Kehe</strong> <em><a href="http://www.twitter.com/jkehe" target="_blank">(@jkehe)</a> wrote about <a href="https://www.wired.com/story/drone-swarms-are-an-illusion-for-now/">drone swarms</a> in issue 26.08</em>.</p>
<p class="paywall"><em>This article appears in the January issue. <a href="https://subscribe.wired.com/subscribe/splits/wired/WIR_Edit_Hardcoded?source=ArticleEnd_CMlink">Subscribe now</a>.</em></p>
<hr class="paywall" />
<h3 class="paywall">More Great WIRED Stories</h3>
</div>