{"id":69621,"date":"2018-12-17T22:04:53","date_gmt":"2018-12-17T22:04:53","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/news.microsoft.com\/?p=429831"},"modified":"2018-12-17T22:04:53","modified_gmt":"2018-12-17T22:04:53","slug":"wired-undersea-servers-stay-cool-while-processing-oceans-of-data","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/2018\/12\/17\/wired-undersea-servers-stay-cool-while-processing-oceans-of-data\/","title":{"rendered":"WIRED: Undersea servers stay cool while processing oceans of data"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Most electronics suffer <\/span>a debilitating aquaphobia. At the \u00adlittlest\u00ad spillage\u2014heaven forbid Dorothy\u2019s bucket\u2014of water<\/a>, our wicked widgets shriek and melt.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s 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 Scientific American<\/a><\/em>, \u201cMany people have impugned the rationality.\u201d<\/p>\n

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Related Stories<\/h4>\n<\/div>\n

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\u2019s the warm iPhone<\/a> on your cheek or a wheezing laptop giving you upper-leg sweats. At scale, it\u2019s Outlook rendered inoperable by remote server meltdown for 16 excruciating hours\u2014which happened in 2013.<\/p>\n

Servers underlie the networked world, constantly refreshing the cloud with droplets of data<\/a>, and they\u2019re 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\u2019t even fact-check these stats on Google (an operation that costs some server, somewhere, a kilojoule of energy).<\/p>\n

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Alyssa Foote<\/cite><\/p>\n<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n

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, \u201cthe equipment is happy,\u201d says Ben Cutler, the project\u2019s manager. (The only exceptions are some of the facility\u2019s \u00adoutward-facing cameras, lately blinded by algal muck.)<\/p>\n

Another Microsoft employee refers to the effort as \u201ckind of a far-out idea.\u201d 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\u2019s first data center, built in 2006, sits on the temperate banks of Oregon\u2019s Columbia River. In 2013, Facebook opened a warehouse in northern Sweden, where winters average \u201320\u00a0degrees Celsius. The data company Green Mountain buried its massive DC1-\u00adStavenger 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 \u201cdata-\u00adindustrial complex\u201d will rely, if it\u2019s to sustainably expand to the farthest reaches, on a nonindustrial means of survival.<\/p>\n

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Alyssa Foote<\/cite><\/p>\n<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n

Underwater centers may represent the next phase, a reverse evolution from land to sea. It\u2019s never been hard, after all, to waterproof large equipment\u2014think of submarines, which get more watertight as they dive deeper and pressure increases. That\u2019s 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>\n

Nonetheless, Cutler says, the concept \u201ccatches people\u2019s imagination.\u201d He receives enthusiastic emails about his sunken center all the time, including one from a man who builds residential swimming pools. \u201cHe was like, you guys could provide the heating for the pools I install!\u201d Cutler says. When pressed on the feasibility of the business model, Cutler adds: \u201cWe have not studied this.\u201d<\/p>\n

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Alyssa Foote<\/cite><\/p>\n<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

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>\n

\u201cI\u2019m not a philosopher, I\u2019m an engineer,\u201d Cutler says, declining to offer any quasipoetic contemplations on the imminent fusion of nature and machine. Still,
\nhe 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\u2014as though the literal cloud, reifying the digital, were peering into the shimmering, unknown depths.<\/p>\n

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Jason Kehe<\/strong> (@jkehe)<\/a> wrote about drone swarms<\/a> in issue 26.08<\/em>.<\/p>\n

This article appears in the January issue. Subscribe now<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n

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More Great WIRED Stories<\/h3>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Most electronics suffer a debilitating aquaphobia. At the \u00adlittlest\u00ad spillage\u2014heaven forbid Dorothy\u2019s bucket\u2014of water, our wicked widgets shriek and melt. Microsoft, 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\u2019s Orkney Islands; around it, approximately 933,333 bucketfuls of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":69622,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[49],"tags":[159,50],"class_list":["post-69621","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-microsoft-news","tag-microsoft-research","tag-recent-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/69621","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=69621"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/69621\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/69622"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=69621"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=69621"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=69621"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}