Contrary to the widespread belief that cloud computing occurs exclusively in cyberspace, in fact, all the work takes place in physical systems - data centers located around the world and consisting of interconnected server stations. To work, these data centers require a huge amount of electricity and as a result produce a huge amount of heat. Of course, this heat needs to be diverted somewhere.
There are many ways to do this, however, Microsoft decided to choose among all the features most original. She decided to place one of her servers on the seabed. Within the project, called Project Natick, the data center was placed inside a 17-ton cylindrical tank measuring 3 x 2 meters and lowered it under water 800 meters from the Pacific coast of the United States. The capacity of the data center placed in a container is equivalent to the capacity of 300 desktop computers.
The data center remained under water for three months from August last year. Its management and monitoring was carried out in a remote manner. The data center was cooled by usual cold ocean water, which removed heat from heat exchangers installed on the outer shell of the tank. Despite the fact that the data center received power from the underwater wires, similar installations can be equipped with their own systems for generating renewable energy, which they will collect, for example, from underwater currents or waves.
Given the extent to which the coastal zones are now populated, such data datas established and operating underwater can be very convenient, since they save space on the ground. This feature is very important to take into account, as the delays in the transmission of information are proportionally increased with the distance between the receiving station and the data center itself.
In addition, the construction of the necessary capacity, which was used in Project Natick, took only 90 days. At the same time, there is no need to build new buildings to install new data centers.
In the future the company plans to build a new submarine capacity, which will be four times larger and can accommodate a data center 20 times more powerful than the previous one. The underwater Internet station is planned to be submerged under water for a year already. At the same time, food for it will be produced already from renewable energy sources. The ultimate goal of the project is the development of underwater data centers, which can be under water for 5 years or more.
The article is based on materials .
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