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Town Expands To Boost Cooling For NSA Data Center
1sockchuck writes "A substantial water supply is critical for most large data centers. A case in point: Officials in Bluffdale, Utah have agreed to annex land housing a new $1.2 billion data center for the National Security Agency. The move makes the NSA a higher priority customer for Bluffdale's water utility, which prevents its water supply from a potential cutoff in the event of a water shortage — which would be a problem, since water will be used extensively in the data center's cooling system. Many large data centers have been working to reduce their water use to make them more sustainable and reliable."
They are afraid the water might be able to be reassembled in such a way as to show the data that the computers were processing when it cooled them.
For God's sake don't tell them I
Every year us Utahns have to deal with our officials telling us there is not enough water to water our lawns or wash our cars and if we keep doing so there will not be enough water for our houses. Our main supply comes from the snow we get in our mountains. So yes we are limited. Our reservoirs have been slowly draining the past few years. Now we have to feed the NSA? And they have priority? Great.... I say give them my toilet water!
It's a shame they don't use a sealed system and just pass the water through. It would require much more water of course, but you could co-locate the data center with the water treatment plant and then just pass all the city's water through the data center to cool it and on to the consumers to drink, so no water would be wasted (although in this case I am not sure who would trust water that had been passed though an NSA controlled facility - if it was Google that would be OK because we know they do no evil :)
Yeah, I'm guessing it's evaporative cooling towers or forced-air evaporators. That would work a treat in the summer time there. (I looked at a humidity trend chart for the town; summertime relative humidities are in the 20-25% range. It's the proverbial "dry heat" you hear about.)
I guess if the town wants its water they'll have to set up vaporator fields downwind of the cooling plant and buy astromech and protocol droids to maintain and program them.
Welcome to the Panopticon. Used to be a prison, now it's your home.
Is it unusable for people after it's been through a datacenter? Why does using it to transfer heat around reduce its utility for drinking?
Depends what part of the cooling loop it ends up being used in. Because you really don't want things like galvanic corrosion or organic goo damaging your cooling system, cooling water that spends an extended period of time in the cooling loop is likely to be pretty nasty. Additives, biocides, dissolved metals, etc. Tasty.
Water that just flows past a heat exchanger into which the main cooling loop dumps its heat is probably just fine. Water used for evaporative cooling should end up being nice and distilled(assuming that there isn't too much unpleasantness in the local air); but the percentage you can re-capture in Utah's climate may or may not be all that exciting...
They opened the windows.
I'm sure Steve Ballmer would throw a chair at you for suggesting they open Windows.
Is Lake Superior in your congressional district? No? Then STFU.
I read the internet for the articles.
Why would you locate something that demands cooling resources in the MIDDLE OF A DESERT?
Because an influential Senator wants the facility there, perhaps?
If they do the plumbing right, all they need to do is channel the hot water into a facility for rest and relaxation. For that matter, it could also be used in other ways. There has got to be a better way than this to make use of this hot water.
Better -- stop the NSA domestic spying.
A significant problem with making a hotspring resort fed by an NSA datacenter is the extreme danger imposed by an inadvertant WikiLeak, and it's effect on the local infrastructure. Liquid NSA data running all over Utah might have unknown effects on the local environment.
Closed with respect to the water, not the energy.
Automobile cooling system work just fine and don't consume fluid when operating properly. An open-loop system (where you lose the coolant) is cheaper and easier to build, but closed-loop systems work perfectly well.
If they ran the water through the system, and then to the customers, wouldn't they have to keep it separate from the secret parts of the facility, to prevent leaks?
Disclaimer: The opinions and actions of the US Gov't are in no way representative of those held by this author or its ci