Microsoft is Putting Computers in the OCEAN
Techquickie
·Techquickie
·2019-05-06
·
1,029 words · ~5 min read
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if you've ever built or upgraded a computer with liquid cooling you'll know
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how effective it can be to put your CPU under water
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i mean not literally but under a water block that has liquid circulating
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through it but could actually submerging computers in the
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world's largest reservoir the freaking ocean be the way of the future well
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microsoft seems to think so and they're already operating underwater server
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farms with other large cloud providers likely to follow suit but why are they
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bothering with something that sounds like it's straight out of futurama and
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how does that even work well it might be fairly easy and cheap to
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cool your home pc adequately a 20 air
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cooler and a couple of case fans is probably going to get the job done just
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fine but when we're talking about cooling off a massive data center
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housing thousands of servers we're talking millions of watts cooling costs
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start to add up very quickly in fact
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it's estimated that data firms spend around a billion and a half dollars
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every year in electricity costs just to
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keep their server farms cool so at these scales efficiency really starts to
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matter and yeah you could always strap thousands of
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water coolers to these servers and call it a day but you would still have to get
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rid of the hot air coming off the radiators so it turns out it's more
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efficient to just take the entire data center and drop it in the sea
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you see water has a high heat capacity
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meaning it can store lots of heat energy without changing its own temperature
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very much think about how a puddle next to the
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swimming pool can stay relatively cool compared to the scorching hot concrete
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right next to it so an underwater data center housed in a
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watertight pod only needs a relatively
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simple heat exchanger to dump its waste heat into the surrounding seawater this
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saves an enormous amount of energy compared to forcing hot air out of data
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centers on land especially when you consider just how much ocean water there is to
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absorb the heat also helping matters is the fact that
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the ocean is quite cold once you go deep
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enough so you'd only have to submerge a server pod in one or 200 meters of sea
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water to get excellent cooling even in warm tropical regions
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and better cooling isn't even the only benefit to ocean-based server farms
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land-based data centers often have to be located in sparsely populated areas due
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to their physical size and lower costs
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for the land and the energy although this can save money it also means that
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the data has to travel further to get to you meaning more latency and lower
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speeds underwater server pods by contrast can be placed close to coastal
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areas where far more people live in fact forty percent of the global population
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resides within a hundred kilometers of a coastline meaning that a coastal server
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pod could make your internet experience feel a bit snappier and speaking of
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snappier it should actually be faster to
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build a bunch of server pods and then dunk them in the ocean compared to
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building new land-based data centers every time a company needs to increase
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capacity i mean sure it comes with some engineering challenges for sure but not
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only does constructing a big server warehouse require a lot of land you also
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have to consider local conditions such as topography the workforce and
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government restrictions anywhere you want to build one underwater server
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farms though could be built in assembly line fashion almost identically and then
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quickly shipped to any place that needs them and they could even be moved around
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if necessary they would just need to be connected to data lines and a power
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source so one microsoft pod that's currently off the scottish coast draws
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power from a nearby wind farm on the orkney islands in fact offshore wind
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installations may prove to be a popular solution for powering these pods in the
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not so distant future now of course sticking a bunch of servers underwater
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presents some real challenges you can't exactly just send a team of divers out
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every time a hard drive fails so the pods need to be designed with
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redundancies and better remote access to allow landlubber technicians to handle
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problems more effectively and i mean here's another fun one engineers have
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even had to work on devising special coatings for the outside of these pods
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to repel barnacles so it turns out that barnacles can
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interfere with heat transfer though i mean i guess they could just do what old
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school seafarers did and send an intern down to scrape them off right
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probably not but you know what is right private
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internet access vpn not only does pia work on up to five devices at once
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hiding your true ip address and allowing you to bypass geo restrictions and
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censorship making it appear as though you're connected from somewhere else it
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also blocks unwanted connections to help prevent attacks autoblocks all traffic
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if the vpn disconnects and it even includes mace pia's built-in malware
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blocker pia supports multiple vpn protocols and encryption levels they
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have apps for Windows mac Android iOS Linux and a chrome extension with
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support for more platforms coming soon and they have over 3 000 servers in 28
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countries also they don't log user activity with
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all those benefits what are you waiting for check them out today at the link
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below so thanks for watching guys like dislike check out our other videos and don't
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forget to leave a comment if you have a suggestion for a future fast as possible
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that's it's down there and also subscribe that's down there too
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so you got to go like looking for it it's like uh it's like submersion
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searching for subscription buttons it's underwater
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but that's not my finest work