Microsoft is Putting Computers in the OCEAN

Microsoft is Putting Computers in the OCEAN

Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Microsoft is Putting Computers in the OCEAN”.
If you’ve ever built or upgraded, a computer with liquid cooling you’ll know how effective it can be to put your CPU under water, I mean not literally, but under a water block that has liquid circulating through it, but could actually submerging computers in the world’s largest reservoir. The freaking ocean be the way of the future. Well, Microsoft seems to think so and they’re already operating underwater server farms with other large cloud providers likely to follow suit. But why are they bothering with something that sounds like it’s straight out of Futurama? How does that even work? Well, it might be fairly easy and cheap to cool your home PC adequately, a $ 20 air cooler and a couple of case fans.

It’S probably gon na get the job done just fine, but when we’re talking about cooling off a massive data center housing, thousands of servers we’re talking millions of watts, cooling costs, start to add up very quickly. In fact, it’s estimated that data firms spend around a billion and a half dollars every year in electricity costs just to keep their server farms cool. So at these scales, efficiency really starts to matter and yeah. You could always strap thousands of water coolers to these servers and call it a day, but you would still have to get rid of the hot air coming off the radiators. So it turns out it’s more efficient to just take the entire data center and drop it in the sea.

Microsoft is Putting Computers in the OCEAN

You see, water has a high heat capacity, meaning it can store lots of heat energy without changing its own temperature. Very much think about how a puddle next to the swimming pool can stay relatively cool compared to the scorching hot concrete right next to it. So an underwater data center housed in a watertight pod only needs a relatively simple heat exchanger to dump its waste heat into the surrounding seawater. This saves an enormous amount of energy compared to forcing hot air out of data centers on land, especially when you consider just how much ocean water there is to absorb the heat.

Microsoft is Putting Computers in the OCEAN

Also, helping matters is the fact that the ocean is quite cold once you go deep enough, so you’d only have to submerge a server pod in one or two hundred meters of sea water to get excellent cooling even in warm tropical regions and better cooling, isn’t even The only benefit to ocean based server farms, land-based data centers often have to be located in sparsely populated areas due to their physical size and lower costs for the land and the energy. Although this can save money, it also means that the data has to travel further to get to you, meaning more latency and lower speeds. Underwater server, pods by contrast, can be placed close to coastal areas where far more people live.

In fact, 40 % of the global population resides within a hundred kilometers of a coastline, meaning that a coastal server pod could make your internet experience feel a bit snappier and speaking of snappier. It should actually be faster to build a bunch of server pods and then dunk them in the ocean compared to building new land-based data centers. Every time a company needs to increase capacity. I mean sure it comes with some engineering challenges for sure, but not only does constructing a big server warehouse require a lot of land. You also have to consider local conditions such as topography, the workforce and government restrictions anywhere. You want to build one underwater server. Farms, though, could be built an assembly-line fashion, almost identically and then quickly shipped to any place that needs them and they could even be moved around if necessary.

They would just need to be connected to data lines and a power source, so one Microsoft, pod, that’s currently off the Scottish coast – draws power from a nearby wind farm on the Orkney Islands. In fact, offshore wind installations may prove to be a popular solution for powering these pods in the not so distant future. Now, of course, sticking a bunch of servers underwater presents some real challenges.

You can’t exactly just send a team of divers out every time. A hard drive fails, so the pods need to be designed with redundancies and better remote access to allow land, lubber technicians to handle problems more effectively, and I mean here’s another fun. One Engineers have even had to work on devising special coatings for the outside of these pods to repel barnacles, so it turns out that barnacles can interfere with heat transfer.

Microsoft is Putting Computers in the OCEAN

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