General > General Technical Chat
Microsoft's underwater data centre
JohnnyMalaria:
Pretty cool, literally.
https://www.bbc.com/news/av/technology-44382659/microsoft-s-underwater-data-centre
Halcyon:
I guess it's kind of cool (keeping the pun going), but you wouldn't want to have a disk fail and require replacement, I suppose you could always send the trainee down there ;-)
Berni:
Its actually quite difficult to use heat from servers in a useful way. About the best you can do is send the hot air trough a office building to keep it warm in winter, but what do you do with it in the summer?
IBM had an idea over here to use there servers to help heat the water a near by swimming complex. Not sure how efficient the whole thing was but they said it worked.
The main issue is that servers like to run in a room temperature environment and usually to get useful heat you need it to be significantly hotter. If you can get water nice and hot then you can send it trough pipes to wherever you want the heat, if you get it even hotter then you get steam that is even more useful. But the server components aren't happy running at such high temperatures.
bd139:
I always thought this is the wrong end of the problem. Rather than working out how to get rid of all of that heat, making less of it should be a commercial priority. The overheads of computing these days are pretty extreme. I reckon you could shave 40% of energy and therefore heat dissipation requirements off through applying computer science and electrical engineering to the problem. Unfortunately most of the compute workloads in azure and AWS where this idea would benefit are from shitty software stacks a mile deep which require very high equipment density to run. Every VM on VM on VM type environment is a nightmare. Repeated dynamic translation and compilation on millions of nodes at a time happens daily over and over again.
Every line of code and algorithm should have a measured efficiency in joules. Every hardware platform should have a relative multiplier for this and be graded on it. Every company should be accountable for their efficiency.
Berni:
Yeah the inefficient way things are done on the web is another thing.
Web services are always layers upon layers of abstraction running on VMs that run inside VMs. Not only is the stuff layers deep but quite often human readable text is used to communicate between systems or even between the layers.
Just the way websites load is a prime example. It opens a TCP/IP port to the server, they do a dance in human readable ASCII before the server barfs the file contents across. The browser looks at it and finds it needs a CSS style sheet so the whole thing is repeated for that. Then it repeats again for the font file in the css, then repeats 10 times to load in the .js scripts, then repeats 50 times to load all the images, then the .js scripts start executing and fetch some json data in the same manner...etc.. about 100 to 1000 TCP/IP connections opened and closed later the browser now has everything that it needs to fully render the page. |O
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