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Iceland Woos Data Centers As Power Costs Soar
call-me-kenneth writes "Business Week covers the soaring demand for power and cooling capacity in data centers. Electricity consumption for US data centers more than doubled between 2000 and 2006. Among the other stats: for every dollar spent on computing equipment in data centers, an additional half dollar is spent each year to power and cool them; and half the electricity used goes for cooling. Iceland, with its cool climate and abundant cheap power, is courting big users like Google and Microsoft as a future data center location. (Can't help thinking they're gonna need a bigger cable first, though.)"
Is there a bigger version of that map around? I can't read a thing on it.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
The ice will just melt.
Run and catch, run and catch, the lamb is caught in the blackberry patch.
Good for Iceland. I hope they get some big fish.
Careful What You Wish For....
Are people forgetting their geography? Iceland is green and Greenland is ice. Shouldn't we consider them as a data center wooing country?
Five good reasons:
1) cheap geothermal power
2) cheap geothermal cooling
3) easy freight
4) educated and even DNA-tracked populace
5) computing is an indoor sport
Five considerations:
1) they like to go whaling; not necessarily a friendly thing in by some opinions
2) latency; not as a bad as a sat, but not as good as Chicago for US; geo centric for North America and EU
3) earthquakes and unsettled geography
4) too many thermal pools to screw off in
5) don't want my server called 'homerdottir'
---- Teach Peace. It's Cheaper Than War.
put them in canada, don't need a map for that one.
I would suggest locating data centers in a cool climate where farming is popular. Pump the waste heat from the data centers into greenhouses that can surround the data center. Now that waste is helping to grow food.
Alaska is actually a good place to implement such a solution. There is a huge amount of sunlight in the summer which, assuming you can avoid frosts, can grow amazing produce. All you need are greenhouses and a heat source. In the winter, when sunlight is no longer plentiful and farming shuts down, the heat can be pumped into local housing. Such a solution would also provide local produce in Alaska - produce that is fresh and doesn't require expensive shipping. One last point about Alaska, it's very central. It might not appear to be when looking at a map, but if you look at a globe you will see that it sits nicely between Asia and North America. I don't know where the current internet pipes are located but if they pass close to Alaska then this idea would be worth some consideration.
William
CCP makers of EVE online are pretty much Icelands biggest tech business and their servers are in London.
You'd have to have a very cheap and very power inefficient server to come even remotely close to their claims of half of the cost of the server on power. An elbaso HP Dl360G5 costs $1600. It will use about 300W at typical load, but lets call it 250W to make the numbers easier. Double this for inefficient cooling and power conversion in the UPS (this is overly costly but makes up for underestimating power usage) so 500W. There are 8,760 hours in a year so 4,380 KwH, you'd have to pay $.20 per KwH to reach their figure, this is over twice the US national average. Prices where you'd want to put a datacenter are closer to $.06-$.08 per KwH. My average server cost closer to $7,000 with battery backed RAID card, dual fast drives, dual CPU's, 4GB memory, 3 year 6 hour repair contract, etc. Even powering that kind of servers off diesel generators fulltime it would have to draw ridiculous amounts of power to cost half it's purchase price in electricity every year.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
The power for cooling is not a "problem" per se. It's just that greedy companies and shareholders want to squeeze out every possible penny. There's a difference between "power is too expensive" and "power could be cheaper".
Air heat transfer is not that good, and you can't just pipe in outside air to cool the data center (due to dust and humidity control), so it doesn't generally work out that a cool outside climate lowers cooling costs significantly. If you compared it to some place with high (35C) normal temperatures, it might make enough of a difference (because standard air conditioning efficiency does drop off in that range IIRC), but that is not most of the US. Also, 50% of power going to cooling is not representative; it should be down closer to 35% from what I remember of our numbers (and we're in a location with relatively hot summers). Our electric rates are also already pretty cheap; commercial rates can go as low as 4.721 cents per kilowatt hour (plus a demand charge).
Icelandic, of course. Plus English for ATC, shipping and international business, and Perl for getting stuff working, of course :)
they're gonna need a bigger cable
Strange coincidence: I actually got some emails about just this subject.
Why is this whole discussion about where everyone should run off to. Rather than spending billions on relocations and construction and cabling, wouldn't that money be better spent of working toward cooler chips (I'm talking operating temp, of course) and more efficient chips? Please someone help redirect the course of this discussion by giving out some real genius on how the current computers could run on less power and produce less heat. What technology have you heard? Where should we be putting our support to help struggling technologies get out there. Everyone is worried about cars and trucks and ozone. This is a great "green" project too!
jsut athnoer menagiensls ltitle psrhae for you to dcoede. Why do we wtsae our tmie dnoig tihs?
1. Part of the year in nearly total darkness. Nerds and the daystar don't mix well.
2. Real reason anyone goes to Iceland: Icelandic girls (fast forward to the third minute)
EvilCON - Made Famous by
The keywords you're looking for are Dunnington and Nehalem
For the really good stuff you'll have to wait for the next process shrink ~3 years (more if competition lets up).
An open question is if more energy efficient processors just mean greater density in the datacenter. Apparently demand for performance shows no sign of letting up any time soon.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
They have nothing BUT geo-thermal power. It will not rise in price (well much). It is what even the US should be pursuing since it is a baseload type power (can be called when needed), whereas solar and wind are being pushed and they are when the time is right.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Looking it over, it is a carbon tax on JUST themselves i.e. their consumption of local product. What is needed is a carbon tax on local products AND what is imported into their area. If they do that, than other areas, including countries will pick it up. In fact, if counties like Iceland, and France will go ahead and do just that, it will have a massive impact on the world.
Even now, California's CARB just backed off on requiring car makers to have sold a couple of percent of Zero Emission Vehicles. They had it set up where the car makers where going to be required to sell just a lousy 2% of their cars as ZEVs and have backed off on that. What a mistake. It would have changed America. No doubt other states would have joined them.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Amazing what a simple heat pump, or just duct work can do for you. A good duct work will allow the outside air to run in the top of the room, and pick up the heat. That is pumped into another room. Iceland is a great choice. But so are PARTS of Canada. Alaska is not because they get the bulk of their energy from natural gas and oil. That will continue to rise in price. Sadly, Alaska is LOADED with volcanoes (nearly all located in the south, where the bulk of the ppl are) and loads of hot spots (through out the state). They are ideal for geo-thermal. But, that once cheap oil, combined with their increasing state payout has locked them into not looking into the future.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
The penguin logo is looking more and more prophetic over time.
Table-ized A.I.
Finally, something intelligent! I thought I remember hearing (but haven't been tracking) the talk about making transistors with something other than ceramic. The metallic based transistor should have MUCH less energy loss through heat. Perhaps there is research that someone else has heard of (usually in the universities) that is talking about really high efficiency and minimal heat loss (the two kinda go together). If we continue to make the chips more efficient (perhaps radically!), we may not be as crazy about moving everything to other countries. The idea of moving to cooler climates is the low-tech solution to the problem.
jsut athnoer menagiensls ltitle psrhae for you to dcoede. Why do we wtsae our tmie dnoig tihs?
It has been independent from Denmark since 1944. People from Iceland are known for speaking English very well.
The Icelandic govt. has just increased their bank rate to 15% and the country is not doing too well. Nor is it's currency. That's not the kind of situation that attracts new investment and this promotion (if that's what it is) doesn't look very promising.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
Iceland doesn't have much in the way of natural resources but it has all that power. The way to export that power so far has been to import alumina and export aluminum. The conversion takes a lot of energy. Server farms are another way of exporting power.
The problem is that no-one in their right mind would house their servers here. We have no real redundancy in connectivity. One cable breaks and we suffer increased latency and reduced throughput. This happens more often than most data center clients could tolerate. The good news is that this problem can be solved with more cables. They're not cheap, but neither is building aluminum smelters. Once there are at least two cables going west and two going east, each with sufficient capacity to carry the whole load, then Iceland will be a very nice place for servers.
Fuck the system? Nah, you might catch something.
Well, though I'm sometimes grammatically correct, I never make much sense (and not in icelandic either). Not sure where your definition of very well fits in there.
The currency is irrelevant. Many of the bigger companies here have Euros as their main currency, for accounting, income and costs. And what does the local bank rate have to do with anything? You think Microsoft will take a loan at 15% in an Icelandic bank? As far as political stability, business freedom, education status etc, look up any recent UN charts - we usually score quite well there, in many cases better than the US for example.
Speaking as a native Icelander, this is lovely news for us here. Mainly for the reason that it would pump investment into our cables. Two weeks ago, the whole nations bandwidth to the rest of the world was cut by 3/4, because of some Scottish farmer accidentally hitting the cable while digging holes for his new fence (not kidding). We seriously need better connection to the rest of the world here!
Supposedly, it was just a series of unfortunate mishaps.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
right on top of active volcanoes and an earthquake prone island.
Yup.
Running with Linux for over 20 years!
OK, I did. On the Great Circle Mapper the distance between Reykjavík and Amsterdam airports is 1270 miles. Anchorage (Ted Stevens International!) to JFK in NY is 3385 miles (2.66x farther). It would make more sense to say "Iceland is close to Amsterdam in the same way Tulsa is close to New York" (1235 mi).
Actually, most of the volcanoes are in in the Aleutian island chain. Most of the population in Alaska in in the Matsu Valley (pdf warning) near Anchorage. Several hundred to a thousand miles away. The only thing in between is Kodiak Island which has a Coast Guard base and a bunch of Grizzly bears.
As was pointed out earlier, the Aleutians aren't a very good place to put data centers. No cable. Not much of anything else except drunken fisherman, rocks and the occasional shipwreck. While there are good geothermal regions there, it's just too damned remote to do anything economically useful except fish.
Same general argument goes for the other isolated geothermal hot spots in Alaska - too much space, not enough infrastructure. Some of us like it that way, so stay the hell out of here....
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
Do you mean these volcano's?Within 400 miles, you have over a dozen, of which there is plenty of heat still coming from these. Now, I admit 400 is a distance, but those would be capable of cutting your electric bill to a fraction of where it is at today.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Oh, btw, this is the map of the geo-thermal hot spots capable of generating electricity. The nice thing about this is that it aligns closely with where your population centers are. Not too surprising when you think about it. The hot spots are going to be warmer than other areas. But these would allow you to build goe-thermal power in the same fashion as they are doing at Chena, AK. In fact, Chena has a greenhouse and is selling power and vegetables to neighboring areas.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Meanwhile, there have been a bunch of major project announcements in Dublin, including major data centers for Eircom and Digital Realty Trust. Dublin has an existing data center workforce, which may be the difference.
Iceland's not alone. Manitoba, Canada is shaping up as another region that is an getting attention from data center builders due to its climate and energy profile. Large power customers in Winnipeg paid an average of 3.6 cents per kilowatt hour in 2007, cheaper than the average rate in virtually every state in the U.S. except Idaho. That's all clean, green power from Manitoba Hydro, which operates 14 hydroelectric generating stations and also buys the output of a 99-megawatt wind farm.
RichM
Data Center Knowledge
Right now, you could make some neat hot tubs but what else would you do with the power?
Here in Southeast Alaska we have hydropower potential up the nose. It rains 11 feet a year here in Sitka. All of our electricity is hydropower. A number of smaller villages, however, run diesel which, of course is getting more and more expensive and is to the point of bankrupting them. Plans have been floated about to try to tie the various towns and villages together to harness the hydropower potential. But it is very expensive (damns, turbines and pole ain't cheap). There are relatively few people in SE Alaska (maybe 40,000 spread over 1000 linear miles).Nobody has been able to come up qwith the up front money to do this. It might get done in the next couple of years if high oil costs keep Alaska's governmental coffers up however the current Governor is trying like mad to keep the current legislators from spending every last penny of that since the oil fields are drying up rather quickly.
And this area has a much denser population than the Aleutian Islands. Who would pay for the transmission lines, if nothing else.
It's a very long way to anywhere out here.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!