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HP's New Data Center Cooled By Glacial Wind
Arvisp writes with this snippet about HP's recently completed datacenter in northeast England, which utilizes the glacial wind blowing off the North Sea to lower temperatures of IT equipment and plant rooms: "The Wynyard takes in the cool air, filters it accordingly and collects it in the management system and is then forced over the front of the server racks before it is exhausted. The result is a hall with a constant temperature of 24C. When the winds become even colder than usual, the exhausted heat is mixed with the outside air to maintain temperatures."
Chilly
Also fp
Canada exporting cold (in whatever form) to California.
With a Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) rating of 1.2 PUE or for every 1.2 watt used to power the equipment, 1 watt is used for cooling, the Wynyard data center is currently HP's most efficient data center.
Did they add the cost to get the power, connectivity, equipment and personnel up there? And will they for more remote places when North America starts doing it?
Bad news for the story writer - global warming is so far advanced that the North Sea is no longer glaciated.
And the land bridge between England and France has been swept away by the melt water!
While people who live in the North East of England would probably say the wind "were a bit chilly" most of the year, the nearest glaciers to Billingham would be in Norway, not exactly close enough to influence weather patterns...
Source: http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/climate/uk/averages/ukmapavge.html#, although you'll have to do the last few clicks to get the correct chart.
What is so special about this?
Toronto has been using water from lake Ontario to cool the downtown core for years.
. . . great views out your data center window . . . great opportunities for winter sports fans . . . oh, and did I mention the mountain climbing . . . ?
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
So what happens when outside temperatures rise to above normal?
Data Center cooling solutions for the future!
Park the servers in the arctic!
I for one highly support this idea as it is not only incredibly efficient but since I live in Iqaluit(its on Baffin Island, in Canada) I might finally get that Fibre line I've always dreamed of!
I've actually been doing something similar involving my gaming PC, patio door, insulation and air conduits. that -40c air makes for some great overclocking headroom! Plus the average 1-2% humidity means theres no measurable frost buildup on the PC internals either.
A glacial wind comes of a glacier. That is a sea wind, a cool wind, a wind, but it is not a glacial wind. The English have never learned about real weather. There is always talk about arctic weather if the temperatures go below zero - arctic weather is in the region of minus 20 to minus 50. It is the north sea that gives temperate weather to Britain, keeps it warmer than continental areas at the same latitude. Ask the Russians!
Artificial Intelligence stands no chance against Natural Stupidity
...then this is an interesting read.
Air blowing over sea water usually contains quite a bit of salt. I wonder how they will deal with the salt. People who live on beach front homes are versed in repair costs to their homes and cars from salt ait.
Cooling with outside air is a bit trickier, since the temperature of the air changes much more quickly. We do this in the computer room of a radio telescope on a 3500m high mountaintop. The AC system has an "economizer" feature provided to cool with outside air, which has been modified to use proportional control to get a much more steady room temperature than the original bang-bang controller. That's needed to keep the analog signal levels from drifting too quickly and messing up the Dicke switching (go look that up). Not so important in a datacenter.
The determined Real Programmer can write Fortran programs in any language.
Microsoft is proud to release:
Gay Ninjas From Outer Space
Is it just me or does anyone else think that a great contributor to global warming is the method with which we create and consume power. We produce most of the electricity with steam and that steam needs to cool off before it can become steam again. They way that steam is cooled is either with water or surrounding air. Every nuclear reactor needs to be next to a river if the outside air is not cold enough. The river on which our reactor is built is 4C hotter after it passes the power plant because it's used to cool the steam. And that temperature increase is constant, all the time. Coal power plants do the same. Then, on the consumer side, we also convert much of that electricity into heat, with inefficient light bulbs, cars (thats why the engine needs a heatsink and a fan), electronic equipment, etc... If your computer uses 150W, thats 150W of heat output per hour. Human body outputs on average ~100Wh.
So in other words, HP's new data center is heating the glacial wind. That means... they're going to melt the glaciers!!!111!
The source article misses some of the coolest design features of this facility. It has the equivalent of a 12-foot high raised floor, using the entire lower level of the facility as a cooling plenum. The fans bring the cool North Sea air into the lower chamber, and they manage the pressure to direct the air up into the server area. There's also a Computerworld story with more details but an erroneous headline that suggests that it's the "first-ever" wind cooled data center. The story makes it clear that the facility has chillers as backup for when the wind dies down or air temperature doesn't support free cooling. Both Microsoft and Google are already running data centers with no on-site chillers.
RichM
Data Center Knowledge
Servers are N Units high. Most are 2 or 3 units. So why lie them flat and try to force air front to back when it wants to rise?
Rotate the servers 90 so they are vertical and leave an approx 1U air gap between them.
And while we're reconfiguring the shape of rack servers. Please put the network ports, console ports at the front, the power ports at the back.
Deleted
We have been doing this in Montana for a long time. When the AC units get frozen over we start pumping filtered air from the outside into the server room.
believing the big bang requires a certain amount of supernatural faith
As an HP employee I have to say HP sucks donkey balls. They treat their employees like crap giving out 3 pay cuts last year while the executive board hands themselves massive bonuses. So, in short be kind and don't purchase any products from HP.
Thanks-
I wonder if cold wind will be enough............considering it wont blow 24x7
Man really is causing global warming.
All those x64 boxes would make the planet Mercury look like a winter wonderland. Now, if they just switched to ARM chips.....
---- Booth was a patriot ----
...the gulf stream goes back to its normal route via Europe...
I hope it does not only work because of the current exceptionally cold situation.
That would be a *DOH* of epic propotions. ;)
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
Guess it's a step in the right direction though, but really not that exciting all in all. I mean cooling by means of cold breeze, BFD. Instead of stopping at using the cold air to cool those racks they should take the full step and figure out a way to re-use the heat energy. Maybe some kind of thermocouple or Peltier system that takes advantage of the temperature difference between the hot server room and the "glacial winds". Or some kind of heat pump arrangement. Now that would be cool, pardon the pun.
I live across the north sea from the datacenter in a place called Norway. Where this ice cold wind supposedly blows from, and it aint here. As has been well known since the vikings raided that part of England, the winds actually blows *from* England *to* Norway 95% of the time. And here in Norway, it is a warm wet wind blowing from England, and it dumps a lot of rain in western Norway. The result is that even at 61 deg north, the winters are mostly rain, not snow. And in the summers, the ocean temperature is higher than Santa Cruz, CA. Compare that to Anchorage, AK at same latitude!
don't cut it off www.mgmbill.org
Seems like a great way to actually warm the globe up to counteract this global warming(which is actually cooling).... but then again all this change of climate(seasons) would seem to be normal, as the weather usually does not stay the same! through the week, year, century, or millennium.
;)
BTW Personally I think algore is a lying profiteer, but that's my opinion... or I could be like algore and say it is a proven fact
FragHARD or don't frag at all
He became an hero.
Glacial? Well, the North Sea off NE England is around 6C at the moment but that's not what I'd call glacial. Last summer (not exactly a "scorcher") it reached 15C, the year before, 16C.
All of this ignores the obvious problem that the prevailing wind over the UK is a SW'ly - and thus the cooling from the sea won't really happen except in summer when sea breezes set in. Indeed, in the winter coastal areas are often warmer than inland. The recent easterlies and NE'lies over England recently have been pretty unusual, all caused by the jet stream being far to the south of usual (it's normally between Scotland and Iceland, but currently it's blasting over the Canaries and the Sahara!)
I note, however, that the link is to an Australian site, so by their standards it is pretty cold in this part of the world.
There is so much hot air in data centers these days.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.