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The Google Navy
theodp writes "Is Google preparing to launch its own Navy? In its just-published application for a patent on the Water-Based Data Center, Google envisions a world where 'computing centers are located on a ship or ships, which are then anchored in a water body from which energy from natural motion of the water may be captured, and turned into electricity and/or pumping power for cooling pumps to carry heat away from computers in the data center.' And you thought The Onion was joking when it reported on Google's Fleet of Naval Warships!"
Add to that wave power, custom built ships just for this purpose anchored in place, fiber connection to the mainland and it may well prove to be cheaper over the long term than a land-based air conditioned building that requires lots of power. Air conditioning is a huge part of the long term cost of a datacenter, using water cooling with abundant supplies of water seems like a very green way of doing things.
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Not to mention that there's no property tax (being taxed to occupy real estate), if the local business or economic climate goes bad you can pick up and be towed to a different location, and you can always add more units if demand increases. The one problem I see is pirates. No, seriously - you anchor one of these away from an area patrolled by a decent navy/coast guard, and I can see someone paying you a visit late one night to haul away equipment...
But seriously, am I the only one who sees an inevitable path from "offshore datacenters" to "cyberpunk future where major corporations like Google declare sovereignty"?
First, sea water temperatures vary greatly depending on the part of the world you're operating in. It's not uncommon for surface sea water temps to be in the 85F(30C)+ range for most areas where you're likely to moor a ship. The AC units that we used were barely able to keep the small server room that I ran cool under those conditions.
Second, the motion of the ship caused premature drive failures due to the pitch and roll of the ship. This could be alleviated with solid state drives, but that's a bit off for a data center at the moment.
Lastly, bandwidth and latency are problematic. Sure, Google could just buy a satellite, but they can't modify the 2000ms latency. Depending on ship size and sea conditions, keeping a satellite lock may be an issue as well due to roll.
All I can really say to Google is, good luck with all that!
Point taken on water temp, security and connections. Why not just have a submersible barge, and drop down to the ocean floor.
Makes it easy to moor. Fiber just lays on the ocean floor. Improved Security, and the water will be much cooler. Sort of a barge made like a giant heatsink. Mount the processors to the hull.
When the barge looses enough hardware, just raise it back up, service it and drop it back down.
Also reduced problems with being pitched around causing lost disk drives. Hurricanes? No problem.
Also, powering the data center using tidal power would be taking energy out of the ocean. While the water cooling would be dumping energy back into the ocean, it will be dumping in less energy than was taken out, so there should actually be a net cooling of the ocean.