from the little-hideaway-beneath-the-waves dept.
Commercial underwater datacenter goes online this year:
A company called Subsea Cloud is planning to have a commercially available undersea datacenter operating off the coast of the US before the end of 2022, with other deployments planned for the Gulf of Mexico and the North Sea.
Subsea, which says it has already deployed its technology with "a friendly government faction," plans to put its first commercial pod into the water before the end of this year near Port Angeles, Washington.
The company claims that placing its datacenter modules underwater can reduce power consumption and carbon dioxide emissions by 40 percent, as well as lowering latency by allowing the datacenter to be located closer to metropolitan areas, many of which are located near the coast.
However, according to Subsea founder Maxie Reynolds, it can also deploy 1MW of capacity for as much as 90 percent less cost than it takes to get 1MW up and running at a land-based facility.
[...] But what happens if something goes wrong, or a customer wants to replace their servers? According to Subsea, customers can schedule periodic maintenance, including server replacement, and the company says that would take 4-16 hours for a team to get to the site, bring up the required pod(s), and replace any equipment.
Related Stories
Tiny data center makes for a comfortable swim:
A data center about the size of a washing machine is being used to heat a public swimming pool in England.
Data centers' servers generate heat as they operate, and interest is growing in finding ways to harness it to cut energy costs and offset carbon emissions.
In this latest example, the computing technology has been placed inside a white box and surrounded by oil, which captures the heat before being pumped into a heat exchanger, according to a BBC report.
The setup is effective enough to heat a council-run swimming pool in Exmouth, about 150 miles west of London, to about 86 degrees Fahrenheit (30 degrees Celsius) for about 60% of the time, saving the operator thousands of dollars. And with energy costs rising sharply in the U.K., and councils looking for ways to save money, an initiative like this could be the difference between the pool staying open and closing down.
Behind the idea is U.K.-based tech startup Deep Green. In exchange for hosting its kit, Deep Green installs free digital boilers at pools and pays for the energy that they use. Meanwhile, tech firms pay Deep Green to use its computing power for various artificial intelligence and machine learning projects.
Related:
Commercial Underwater Datacenter Goes Online This Year
Microsoft's Underwater Server Experiment Resurfaces After Two Years
Heating Homes and Businesses with "Data Furnaces"
(Score: 4, Interesting) by shrewdsheep on Monday September 05 2022, @10:55AM (1 child)
Mount the pods to the under-water parts of offshore wind. Co-maintain the structures. To complete it all, add house-boats in a couple of years when we all have to move there. Then, of course, we have to find a new definition of offshore and repeat the cycle.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Monday September 05 2022, @11:37PM
Major issue with houseboats in an offshore wind farm is wave action, probably better to put wave energy extractors among the windmills and save the houseboats for more protected waters.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 05 2022, @11:29AM
Remember the Rex, Showboat, and Tango offshore from Santa Monica and Long Beach, California (USA) in international waters to avoid jurisdiction issues?
"A friendly government faction", eh?
Maybe other nations want to show USA how they feel about USA parking national interests within spitting distance of their borders?
Tax-Free "land" ?
(Score: 3, Interesting) by bradley13 on Monday September 05 2022, @01:43PM (9 children)
I assume they are remaining within territorial limits, so that they can call for law enforcement to prevent theft. This is great, as long as not many people do thus. However, eventually the countries/states/towns will want those services paid with property taxes.
Also, as soon as there is any competition for space or rights of way, questions of ownership will become important.
All of this, plus the technical challenges, to gain easy access to cooling. Hard to see how it can really be worthwhile...
Everyone is somebody else's weirdo.
(Score: 2) by captain normal on Monday September 05 2022, @03:23PM (5 children)
Port Angeles, Washington is definitely within US territorial limits, unless of course it's more than ~7 miles offshore. That would place it in Canadian Waters.
On another note, as an old sailor, my experience is that electronics and salt water do not mix very well.
When life isn't going right, go left.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by legont on Monday September 05 2022, @08:30PM (4 children)
The way it looks to me, they took a shipping container, installed servers in it, filled it with dielectric liquid, and put on the bottom. This should work in terms of salt water.
However, I doubt passive cooling would work very well. I also doubt the server replacement claim.
I could probably try it on my lake. A fuel drum, dielectric fluid, and a cable.
"Wealth is the relentless enemy of understanding" - John Kenneth Galbraith.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday September 05 2022, @11:06PM (3 children)
They have to keep the barnacles and other biological stuff off. Even toxic paint only goes so far.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by JoeMerchant on Monday September 05 2022, @11:40PM (2 children)
They only have to keep the access panels and lifting points free of biofouling, a crust of stuff is probably beneficial elsewhere. If they put the access panels on the bottom, that will probably keep the growth to a minimum, and if they're lifting with buoyant bags - it's amazing how much uplift those can generate.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday September 06 2022, @12:33AM (1 child)
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday September 06 2022, @11:02AM
Good point, although the marine A/C on our boat stays barnacle free even while the toxic painted hull requires regular cleaning... With all the power going into the servers, pumping a little water through some copper pipes and heat exchangers to the interior liquid would seem trivial and sensible and in colder waters more than enough heat exchange to let the servers "passively cool" from there.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 3, Interesting) by khallow on Monday September 05 2022, @04:55PM (2 children)
Finally, if you're building serious water-based power infrastructure anyway, it's a nice value add, for example, something to add to your off-shore wind generators.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 05 2022, @08:33PM (1 child)
Obviously, you did not read the source. They say they use passive cooling.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by khallow on Monday September 05 2022, @10:51PM
And? You can sink a lot more heat passively in ocean than you can to atmosphere.