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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!"
Very good idea from a cooling point of view I suppose, the a/c bills for a big datacenter can be huge. But enough to offset the cost of operating an entire ship..?
Now focus on that apart from the fact that it would also allow them to shift the jurisdiction of their operations when laws change in specific regions.
Hell, fill them with enough guns and they could just put them in international waters. If any of these are launched, shall we start the pool on how long until the "Google fighting Piracy" joke headlines?
Ice Cream has no bones.
Is there more than just being eco-friendly to this? I can see this being used to avoid taxes, censorship laws, etc.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
Google envisions a world where 'computing centers are located on a ship or ships
My father-in-law worked as a linesman for AT&T about 30 years at a beach town in southern New Jersey. He told me that they had to replace electrnoic components almost twice as quickly as more inland areas because of the more corrosive saltwater air.
If this is a real effect, I imagine that it will be difficult to prevent on a ship in the ocean.
I'm a big tall mofo.
are these going to be stationed more than 12 nautical miles away from the coast? 'cause, you know, then they wouldn't be under US jurisdiction.
My sig has been answered.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
But there's the matter of pizza delivery.
And then let the ships circle around the edge of the Pacific ocean, picking up IT workers along the way to drop off in America.
Hmmmmn...
Where have I heard that before?
"Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former."
Am I the only one who thinks google is overreaching? Doing stuff just because they have tons of cash..for now..
In all seriousness, there may be interesting tax implications if these datacenters are put outside of US waters.
Colin McNamara - CCIE #18233 "The difficult we do immediately, the impossible just takes a little longer"
So presumably these ships will connect through a series of Google-Sats in geo-stationary orbits, linking to a Google-hub in each country. And behold, Google shall inherit the Earth. Thankfully, a network of Microsoft terrorists will be able to track then using Virtual Earth and infect the servers with Windows, thus rendering them useless and saving us all.
Smivs on the intertubes!
It will need to work better then windows for warships to be a good idea.
If the the Onion is right then my tickets to get out of Sri-Lanka are already bought.
It will be water logged!
I'm not sure which reference is more appropriate: Crytponomicon data haven, or The Raft in Snowcrash...
-- My Sig is a P228.
Sounds like they might be attempting the equivalent of Pirate Radio and could be a way to avoid a lot of different national laws and regulations. I'm sure there is not a lot of copyright or patent protection in Maritime Law.
If Google (or Microsoft, or Apple, or..) doesn't patent every single idea they come up with now, someone else will sue them for it later on. If you were sued as often as Google, you'd learn to CYA every chance you could get. Such insanity is the price of doing business in the USA.
So owning patents (frivolous or not) is neutral. Releasing patents to the public is good. Suing others over frivolous patents is evil.
Google may not be doing "good", but they're still following their mantra.
How can I believe you when you tell me what I don't want to hear?
First of all, so what?
Second of all, I don't think you'll find a google data center to be on par with a nuclear power plant. They might have some heat to dissipate but the water isn't exactly going to be boiling.
What if Google actually wants to harness the power from the waves? It isn't possible that anything offshore can be in good intention? There aren't much waves inland.
No.
GoogleBoat will GoogleFloat to a (Google)Safe (Google)Location.
A horse can't be sick, you know, even if he wants to.
So far this is the only comment that asks the first question that popped into my head. That heat does have to go somewhere.
Life is rarely fair. Cherish the moments when there is a right answer.
Hi, Actually this idea is not new!
:) ). :)) and space launching sites. Expanding on that idea, Hamilton even has the Evans corporation own space factories which have their own cybernetic data-cores.
The 1st time I read about this idea, was in a book from Bruce Sterling (which title I unfortunately can not remember - could be Islands in the Net or one of his short stories). I vaguely remember that William Gibson also mentioned floating data centers in a short story (sorry, must be the old age that prohibits my memory from spewing the titles: maybe I should start rereading? I am sure that some or other of you youngster geeks will find the relevant title
A more recent mention and variation on this idea, is from Peter F. Hamilton in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mindstar_Rising, where they have huge floating factories (offshore for tax purposes
It is a public secret that Page & Brin are still in charge of Google's executive ideas and experiments. Those ships prove that those guys read their portion of SF and sometimes try out a few of them. So how long before we see Google's first orbital data-center?
Peace & Long Life,
MadMan-2
AC at 2 cycles per day.
... but patenting it? WTF?
Sorry, Google, but the patent really doesn't fit with "don't be evil." Do you guys remember that phrase?
even worse, it's a submarine patent!
Ocean-water-cooling would just move the heat pollution of data centers from an urban area to the ocean. I am not sure that is an improvement. Substantial temperature changes have major effects on ocean microecosystems.
Stephenson? Pfft!
A better reference might be to Maas-Neotek from Mona Lisa Overdrive and other books.
Shop as usual. And avoid panic buying.
That's why Google is also developing the ED-209.
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"?
The ship may not be teritorial waters but the fiber connection surely is....
Undetectable Steganography? Yep, there's an app fo
A San Francisco startup is working on a fleet of data centers on cargo ships, as discussed here on Slashdot earlier this year..
RichM
Data Center Knowledge
You pump really cold water up from a few thousand feet and pump the warm water,the heat, over the side and it just 'floats' away. No problem really.
Undetectable Steganography? Yep, there's an app fo
People are always ranting about patent abuse over here, now Google is filing a patent on basically "computing on a ship" and nobody's screaming about it????
This is a good _idea_, but that's it! It's not a patenteable invention.
As a person interested in seasteading I am quite concerned over paying royalties to Google over running a server in my future home.
Send your spendthrift head of state this
Ships - been done
Wave motion electrical generation - been done
Data Center - been done
Marine Cables - been done
Self contained electrical generating stations connected to shore by cables and monitored by onboard computers that also store info - been done
Do I detect the filing patents for the purposes of doing EVIL??
Undetectable Steganography? Yep, there's an app fo
Assuming Google remains a United States company, has U.S. bank accounts, does business in the U.S., has its employees and managers on U.S. soil instead of moving them all to the boat too, and so on, it'll be pretty easily subject to U.S. laws.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
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.
Why not put them underground instead? Or tethered to a balloon filled with helium? Why not?
// MD_Update(&m,buf,j);
Seriously. I would not want to work 1000 miles from my home on that "ship" and outside of any laws, because if anyone complains about payment or freedom, they could shoot him and dump him in the water. (Look for sharks first, so there's no body floating on the sea... or edit Google earth ;)
And only the US navy (thinking the world is theirs anyway, which it probably is... :( ) could stop them. But would they? I mean Google has money... and power... and soon it's own country with its own laws.
I guess first they have to become a new point in the axis of evil. But I fear they will become an ally... one of the axis of doubleminusgood.
Oh well... I'm drifting away...
P.S.: Yeah, my English is that bad. How good is your Luxemburgish? :P
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
Wow, I sank Google! :-)
This is my sig.
Floating data centres... fine that's cool. But when they have navies patrolling the waters to protect the servers. That'll be the real story.
Well, the heat being given off by the servers would have come from the mechanical energy that was initially taken out of the ocean. The heat is being dumped back into the ocean, so actually, there will be a net heat loss in the water because energy is being used to run the servers.
Uh...sorry to report us sailors have been using the wave action captured in the sink seacock fitting and the wave action to power the fridge for some time. Google marine refrigeration and sniff around and you will find out who sells it. I can't just remember but my impression was that it wasn't one of the cheaper suppliers.
Does this mean they have a functioning model of such a data center? I imagine they'd need one to get a patent on this...
Wasn't it Sun that had a setup with shipping container filled with servers and networking gear. Converting an cargoship into a data center could be as simple as loading the containers, networking them, and voila instant sea based cluster. Lots of power options as well, nuclear, solar, wind, wave...
>P.S.: Yeah, my English is that bad. How good is your Luxemburgish? :P
Ganz gutt, firwat?
The patent application confirms that Google has data center containers. The company patented the concept several years ago, but some developers of the Google container have said they abandoned the project. But the filing describes containers being lifted on and off ships by cranes.
Sounds like easy pickings for a band of real pirates.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
There are still laws, even in international waters.
plus countries are extending their 'boundaries' more and more, to the point there will be no true international waters left.
And don't forget if you are in International waters, you are on your own. Don't expect the coast guard to drop by to help when you get attacked.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
They hardly need to connect a fibre cable to any particular country. Hell they could anchor on top of one of the undersea cables and just tap straight in and rent the bandwidth directly from the people that own the cable. Hell it's google, they could lay their own damn cable. What more os a concern is if you're using sea water to cool your server you need to filter that water VERY well unless you want the try dealing with the corrosion inside your water blocks.
Normal people worry me!
Google envisions a world where 'computing centers are located on a ship or ships, which are then anchored in a water body
...outside the jurisdiction of national intelligence services,...
Have gnu, will travel.
Something like 99.4% of patents never make a cent.
This one is particularly loopy.
Let's do the math. Let's say Google buys the Queen Mary. 80,000 tons. Let's say they anchor it someplace with an average wave height of 20 feet, wave period of 10 seconds. Raising 80,000 tons at 2 feet per second takes about 160,000 horsepower. Hmmm, that's very close to the original steaming capacity of the QM. In watts, that's about 120 megawatts, about ten times more than you'd need if you packed the ship with servers. Okay, so that looks easily doable.
Problem is, buying the electricity would be much cheaper. 12 megawatts will cost you about $700 an hour. Can you run and maintain and pay on the principal and pay salaries and insurance on $700/hour? No, not a couple of powers of ten.
Arr, this be like Pirate Radio in days of yore.
Google forgot the part about not being evil some time ago.
Instead, Google will provide target search service for the Navy. Of course, the Navy men could also use the classic tools from Google such as "I am feeling lucky" and "sponsored links". The latter one is full of targets nominated by whoever pays the most for the particular keyword.
Regardless of who owns that cable reaches a country it and the signals are under their the countries control. The only real way to get around the whole thing is to launch your own internet communications satilite.
Not really you just use a fresh water cooling coil in the cold sea water.
Undetectable Steganography? Yep, there's an app fo
Whoa, I used to jokingly tell people that Luxembourgish was my native language. I didn't think I would ever meet someone who spoke it.
"You don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows." - Bob Dylan
and put him in command of the fleet. there wont be any pirate problems after that.
Read radical news here
I guess this means that the sea org finally has an enemy.
I suppose the patent would still be valid in the U.S. but what are the ramifications if they are doing this outside of U.s. waters? Never mind the fact that this sounds like another bullshit patent anyway.
-- I ignore anonymous replies to my comments and postings.
Rather than put it on a ship, why not put it on a stable platform, similar to an offshore oil rig?
You could still generate energy via wave power, but the platform would be stable enough that premature hard drive failure wouldn't be a problem.
Air in the datacenter rooms would need to be kept free of salt and spray, but this is do-able with proper filtration.
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
Since servers convert all energy to heat, there will neither be a net heat loss nor a net heat increase. So the ship will be neutral to the ocean with respect to heat.
This assumes that no heat is released to the athmosphere which is not 100% the case. So in total we can expect a very small cooling effect on the ocean and a very small heating effect of the athmosphere. I think that even that small effect can be mitigated or compensated by proper technology. ( but it won't probably be worth the effort )
Also, when we talk about heat, the effect of sunlight on the ship has to be taken into account. But I guess that by choosing a suitable color for the ship, the effect of the sunlight on the total heat budget can be geared towards neutral, i.e. to have the same effect on the ocean as if the ship were not there.
So, actually, such a ship can be very environmently friendly if properly designed.
Not many waves underground or in the air?
Semi-automatic amateur armchair Australian philosopher; conjecture ready at any moment...
I can see this idea being utilized in Dubai/ United Arab Emirates. They're actually building tons of small islands/islettes. There was a special regarding this on CNBC with Maria Bartiromo. I could see a huge datacenter on a ship/platform serving this future community utilizing sea water as a chiller and saving money on the energy bill. I think an environmental impact study might need to be done if the bay will be absorbing all that heat though.
Beware of those who profit off the docile and persecute the unbelievers.
Since servers convert all energy to heat,
Is that true? I'm not well versed in the actual workings of a server, but isn't part of the energy put into the mechanical energy of spinning hard drives? Granted, all of that energy will then turn into heat once the whole ship is shut down, but I would've figured that wouldn't happen until way in the future.
the effect of sunlight on the ship has to be taken into account.
True, but the heat from the sun would've gone into the ocean anyway, so having anything out in the ocean at all will still be neutral (from a sunlight standpoint).
Google is starting to sound like Scientology with their Sea Org. Next they'll start charging to have your surfing records "cleared."
Hic iacet Arthurus, rex quondam rexque futurus.
If they are using the energy of the sea to power electronic equipment then even if it was 100% efficient there is no net gain of heat for the water.
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
"Will our daring data-center defy destruction by deluge?
Or will the evil BandwidthCzar blow them beyond all believable bounds?
Tune in next week,
Same GoogleTime,
Same GoogleChannel."
Ohh... nach e Letzeburger! E wonner! :D
An ech haat geduert ech wier eleng hei!
Ech sin vu Mutfert (bei Sandweiler), mee ech wunnen elo an DÃitschland.
Wou kenns du hier?
P.S.: Schued, Slashdot ka keen Unicode. :(
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
There are only 484,000 of us. And only 70% of them speak Luxemburgish. Aaand... 42.6% are aliens (from earth! I don't mean the bankers there. ;) :)
Interestingly, there is even a native Luxemburgish community in the USA.
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
What laws are there in these waters?
And who defines them?
I don't think that anybody has those rights.
of course if you put some gunships there, you define the laws. But else?
What if I want to create my own friendly country, where it's illegal to wear clothes, and populating trough reproduction is the highest of our values, to be practiced in big fuckfests 9-monthly? Oh and if you don't keep your body and mindin shape, you will be expelled from the country. (Which will be our only legal punishment.)
There will be no blackjack. And no need for hookers. But it will be our own island. :D
One more idea: You're entitled to a fuckathon for nationalizing and obeying our laws for at least 10 years.
I bet it will be a huge success! :D
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
So when can we get on board?
>Ech sin vu Mutfert (bei Sandweiler), mee ech wunnen elo an DÃitschland.
Merziger schmeckt herziger? ;-)
>Wou kenns du hier?
Diddeléng.
Soon, The Pirate Bay will have a new home in international waters....
Nothing to see here. Move along.
Everyone knows that waves heat water. Common knowledge, that. /me heads of to cook spaghetti by shaking the pot.
The Unmanned Pirate-Hunting boat is old news from 2006 but I didn't know Google was involved! But you can be certain Google knows about it... because I googled to find that article again.