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Facebook's Newest Datacenter Relies On Arctic Cooling
Nerval's Lobster writes "One year and seven months after beginning construction, Facebook has brought its first datacenter on foreign soil online. That soil is in Lulea, town of 75,000 people on northern Sweden's east coast, just miles south of the boundary separating the Arctic Circle from the somewhat-less-frigid land below it. Lulea (also nicknamed The Node Pole for the number of datacenters in the area) is in the coldest area of Sweden and shares the same latitude as Fairbanks, Alaska, according to a local booster site. The constant, biting wind may have stunted the growth of Lulea's tourism industry, but it has proven a big factor in luring big IT facilities into the area. Datacenters in Lulea are just as difficult to power and cool as any other concentrated mass of IT equipment, but their owners can slash the cost of cooling all those servers and storage units simply by opening a window: the temperature in Lulea hasn't stayed at or above 86 degrees Fahrenheit for 24 hours since 1961, and the average temperature is a bracing 29.6 Fahrenheit. Air cooling might prove a partial substitute for powered environmental control, but Facebook's datacenter still needed 120megawatts of steady power to keep the social servers humming. Sweden has among the lowest electricity costs in Europe, and the Lulea area reportedly has among the lowest power costs in Sweden. Low electricity prices are at least partly due to the area's proximity to the powerful Lulea River and the line of hydroelectric dams that draw power from it."
With all those datacenters the town won't be that cold for long.
Thanks to global warming they won't be cool for much longer.
If there were just a way to extract energy from the ambient environment in some sort of reasonably efficient fashion we could build these datacenters in warmer areas, deserts even. All that 120-degree desert in africa would suddenly become valuable real-estate.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
I know a lot of ./ is gonna come at this from a "those greedy scum bags" point of view, but this makes perfect sense from an overall humanity point of view, not just a greedy corporation point of view. Put power hungry stuff in a place where the power doesn't spew CO2 into the atmosphere thanks to hydroelectric. Someplace where they can use much less power by taking advantage of the outside cold. This is how it should be.
title says it all...the issue though is scale when talking about datacenters
Average Temp = -1.3 Celsius (29.6 Fahrenheit) Highest = 30 Celsius (86 Fahrenheit) For those who believe the freezing and boiling points of water also make good reference points.
"The constant, biting wind may have stunted the growth of Lulea's tourism industry...". Now they can build a resort downwind of the data centers. Everyone wins!
Thanks to wind and ocean currents all of Europe is warmer than many places in North America at the same latitude. Wisconsin gets colder than this place. I think it has more to do with abundant water and better year round temperature consistency.
The NSA will gets $4 billion budget for cyber operations. Say 10% is spent on data storage, and they pay way over the odds at $100/TB.
$400,000,000 / 100 = 4,000,000 Terabytes = 4 Billion Gigabytes
2 billion people online = 2 GB per person per year
And that's why they have huge data centers and projects to build two more stretching into 2016.
Or alternatively, since it's mostly Americans getting spied on, more like 13GB per US citizen per year, from just 10% of their budget.
That's enough for phone meta data, messages, email texts, lots of attachments too, Skype messages, browser history, quite a few phone calls, medical, financial, oh and your facebook data no doubt.
Facebook, the friendly face of the NSA.
Lulea is a major center of the iron mining industry of northern Sweden, which produces massive amounts of waste heat. This is used to great advantage by the town already, and when Facebook asked the town if they should just went into the atmosphere or if they wanted to use the waste heat, the town said "no, thank you." Source: I'm a native of Lulea.
Only at sea level.
The US Constitution doesn't apply to datacenters not on US soil, right?
It's representative of the questions scientists were puzzled by 150 years ago, and which are still confusing to many of the rest of us.
Arctic Cooling makes some good thermal paste, and they are widely reputed and recommended. Might I also recommend cooling with Prolimatech.
Do we know what they use for heatsinks, fans, or maybe water cooling components?
That's right, I didn't even read the summary. Come at me bros.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/10/31/facebook_swedish_data_centre_privacy_law/
"A controversial Swedish internet surveillance law passed in 2008 allows the government there to intercept any internet traffic that passes Sweden's borders with no need for a court warrant. It's called the FRA law and the Swedes don't like it, and Google called it "unfit for a Western democracy". And the rest of Europe could start to get annoyed by it too when that internet traffic includes their Facebook data."
That's why they chose Sweden.
Oh and it's an NSA listening post for Baltic and Russia, but hey, lets not remind ourselves of that.
If FB works well that all that matters.
When I read the title, I totally thought they were ricing out the workstations with gaming heatsinks.
Something the article forgot to mention is that it's not just the cost of electricity but also the reliability, Luleå hasn't had a major power outage since 1979.
It is not in the Arctic at all.
So there ! Pffffffftttttt !
Lulea is pretty much at sea level.
Firstly it's called Luleå (let's see if that works) and secondly I doubt it's the coldest place in Sweden. There are some clips of the building here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uJTGoTMHRHg
http://www.svt.se/nyheter/regionalt/nordnytt/#./idag-invigs-forsta-serverhallen
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xfmm7FPvxmI
Get your spelling right. It's "Luleå", not "Lulea".
The first one is pronounced like "lu-leh-oh", the second would be "lu-leh-ah".
The temperature in Lulea hasn't stayed at or above 86 degrees Fahrenheit for 24 hours since 1961
That'd be 30C at the coldest time of night. I doubt the whole damn Europe has many places that have experienced that. Except probably for Lulea at 1961, due to the magical property of sun not fucking setting down.
Been there. Close to the central square, there is a street that is quite steep. To prevent the unavoidable car crashes in winter, they simply heat the asphalt. I guess they could use datacenter heat right there.. Once you get out of the city center, it has beautiful nature..
10 ?"Hello World" life was simple then
So instead of raining in data centres, it now snows in data centres.
Does this mean Facebook must apply the EU privacy policies to all users that may have data stored in the new datacentre?
Another good place to host the datacenter would have been iceland. Its winters are not as cold, but the summers are significantly colder. The average high in July is 14 C, compared with 20 in Lulea). It also has abundant, cheap geothermal energy, which makes it popular for aluminium production. To service one of the aluminium plants there, a 630 MW power station was built. Until then, the total power consumption of Iceland had been about 300 MW! According to this table, the price of electricity in Iceland is about 1/3rd of that in Sweden (though perhaps it is even lower in Lulea?).
Both Sweden and Iceland are actually atypically warm for their Latitude due to the Gulf Stream. So if temperature were the only concern, somewhere in Alaska or coastal Russia would be better. I guess accessibility also matters a lot here.
> Both Sweden and Iceland are actually atypically warm for their Latitude due to the Gulf Stream.
That would be Norway's coast you're talking about, Sweden has little or no Atlantic coast line and mainly faces the Baltic Sea.
- Iceland is a good suggestion with regards to power, except for the distance to core markets and network capacity.
- Scandinavia is closer to mainland Europe and can more easily add new cables at much lower cost.
- We have more hydroelectric power than anyone could ever use; Norway has been >99% hydro for the last 100 years (homes and heavy industry).
Recent research shows that it's not just the Gulf Stream that makes the climate in Scandinavia comfortable; try the Rocky Mountains
For those who believe the freezing and boiling points of water also make good reference points.
Well, I'm glad you put the temperature in F as well, since I find the body temperature of a cow very much more intuitive.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
Luleå is the main port for Swedish steel, and there is quite a lot of it. So the powerusage of that data center is puny in comparision.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waste_heat
I don't stick my hand into freezing or boiling water really any more than I have to, but I go outside every day.
I'll cheerfully take my reference points being (broadly) the coldest/warmest people in temperate climes experience personally as far more useful than your particularly arbitrary references, thanks!
-Styopa
Star Trek: First Contact
Remember the view from the Enteprise bridge just after trime traveling into a Borg'ified parallel future? How the United States was joined to Cuba by Planetary scale pipelines and conduits?
I thought this is the beginning of something like that.
We'll start rearranging the Planet to support a huge intellectural brain.. each of us will become a mere local experience processing node.
And the Forbin Project will guide our planet of the Binares into the Brave New World.
What they are doing is using the free cold to cut their costs. But of course that heating will effect the weather in that area, which will affect the ecosystem which will start to spread its effect. There may be widespread and deeply felt consequences down the road, but not for Facebook. Dumping heat is the same sort of externalized cost as say dumping waste chemicals in a stream. The company does not pay, it lets those downstream pay. You could argue that the effect is small but as we know the butterfly effect is real and unpredictable All they really know is that they are going to pay less money for cooling. Be damned with the rest of the world.
What about building datacenters in Iceland, taking advantage of low temps, as well as geothermal energy?
When I was a boy we sometimes went to Luleå in the summer, because the weather there is warmer and more stable, than were I come from (Narvik, Norway).
It was a long drive.
Fahrenheit is based on a brine solution of water, ice, and ammonium chloride at 0. I'll assume your comment was based on some notion that a dairy cow's body temp is 100 degrees, which is also false.
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
At the same time we hear of the NSA building its data center in Utah, where summer temperatures sit around 105. Is "intelligence" the right word for these services?
Hot indoor air and cold outdoor air give a temperature gradient that can generate electricity for the servers. This is in addition to the energy savings from cooling the servers with outdoor air. You can use the waste heat to heat houses, bypassing the generation stage completely. Of course, all these systems trade off against each other in a thermal balance. The calculation to optimize it would be fascinating. I want to design this.