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Nuke Site Converted Into Green Data Center
1sockchuck writes "If you had 100,000 servers, would you put them on top of a former nuclear fuel facility? One of the world's largest web hosts, 1&1 Internet, is building a new data center on a site in Hanau, Germany previously used by Siemens to produce mixed oxide rods made from enriched uranium and plutonium. The site has been cleaned up, and 1&1 is converting it into a 'green' data center powered by renewable energy and using free cooling to save on air conditioning costs."
Oddly enough, TFA says nothing about the site being cleaned up.
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I've read quite a bit about this whole idea of free cooling, and as far as I've been able to conclude, the basic premise is that the replacement cost for failures very much outweighs the costs for cooling it properly.
If you realize that the last decade or so, most components can easilly be overclocked with proper cooling, and will function quite well in a wide range of temperatures, it's not hard to imagine that operating temperatures of anywhere between -10C and +40C are generally fine for most equipment.
The only thing that would be affected, in the sense of less cleaning of air, would be movable parts components, like harddisks, fans, etc.
With the prices on HDDs and the ease of use and availability of any sort of RAID configuration you can think of, the actual costs for replacing these parts when they fail, could very well be a fraction of the costs that would be required to make them function 'properly'.
All in all it seems an economically very viable option, with the added advantage of using a lot less energy overall.
Coz eternity my friend, is a long *ing time.
that is unexplained, i usually say something like "probably a stray cosmic ray"
for the technically inclined, this usually elicits a laugh
for the technically uninclined this usually elicits a stony face of seriousness
try this comment sometime, its win win. its a good litmus test for the level of technical acumen you are dealing with in someone
however, these guys can actually say this sort of thing with a straight face: "probably a stray gamma ray"
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
There is a ton of places, like any northern places in Canada, where electricity is cheap and is really cool nearly all year long. I could think about Quebec province, in Canada. Electricity is approximatly 5 cents (canadian) per kw.h (like 4 cents US$) and it would cost nothing to cool down as much server as you want. Maybe some company already have such datacenters, but I could think about some google / microsoft datacenter going to canada, to save on electricity bills and cooling.
Actually, cosmic rays can and do cause errors. Muon flux where I live tends to be roughly one through your hand per second, and they're going a pretty hefty fraction of C. With memory size and transistors scaling further and further down, cosmic ray interference becomes a really big issue, which is why ECC is so important.
http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/Xplore/login.jsp?url=/iel1/16/6912/00278509.pdf?temp=x
We're dealing with more delicate technology these days; It's only gotten worse since then.
I recall that back in the old days when expensive ICs were packaged in ceramic and cheap ones in plastic, cheap memory was less prone to bit errors because some of the ceramics contained, as it turned out, significant amounts of radioactivity. Potassium, for instance, is noticeably radioactive in its natural state (one of its isotopes is unstable).
Given that the concrete won't be made from raw materials collected on site, nor will the aluminum and steel in the server racks, and that the only really common beta emitter (tritium) produces electrons with less energy than those in an old style CRT, your fears are groundless.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."