'Biggest Data Center' To Be Built in Arctic (bbc.com)

A small town in the remote north of the Arctic Circle is set to be home to the world's largest data center. From a report: The firm behind the project, Kolos, says the chilled air and abundant hydropower available locally would help it keep its energy costs down. The area, however, suffers the country's highest rate of sick leave from work, which may be related to its past as a mining community. The US-Norwegian company says it has already raised "several million dollars" for the project from Norwegian private investors. However, it is still working with a US investment bank to secure the remaining necessary funds.

Comments

Fortitude

[mydn]

Sounds like the sequel to Fortitude.

Re: Global warming

[xxxJonBoyxxx]

"I don't want to throw cold water on your plans..."

Re:How do they handle winter power generation?

[doconnor]

Rivers large enough to have hydro dams only freeze at the surface and continue to flow under the ice.

Just an idea

[captaindomon]

From the article: "The US-Norwegian company says it has already raised "several million dollars" for the project from Norwegian private investors. However, it is still working with a US investment bank to secure the remaining necessary funds." So it's just an interesting idea and a grab for investor funds right now.

Vendor response time

[shuz]

I am curious how they plan to service the town. The town airport doesn't even show up on the list of airports in the country. I would estimate it at 200ft or less. A Beechcraft Kingair, a typical small town cargo plane, requires more runway space. Narvik is the closest large airport and that is 110 miles away through a twisty highway through the fjords. Ships are great for large cargo but not for fast cargo. The DC manager can overcome some vendor issues by having trained/certified intelligent hands that work shifts. But if you are creating the largest datacenter in the world then I hope that you also plan to have a large commercial airport as well and possibly some amount of major vendor buy in. Expect requirements of 4 hours or less vendor presence. 4 hours from Narvik to Ballangen in the winter might be tricky.

Good luck with the logistics!

Re:Vendor response time

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

I wonder if they are just optimistic about the buy-in; or if they are angling for a specific flavor of customer: someone whose IT setup requires the ability to get a vendor specific FRU swapped out in short order is probably better served just putting it in a less hostile location. You'll pay slightly more; but it's not like finding a colo in the cheaper suburbs of a large number of nontrivial cities is terribly difficult; and those will be in range of your vendor's warranty coverage and your preferred shipping service's overnight offerings(and if you choose the one near you, you can have one of your people go poke it in person without it turning into a business trip). If your IT setup involves container loads of semi-expendable, identical, hardware with most of the redundancy in your fancy software layer; then the possibility of paying less to feed and cool it, at the cost of only having access to spares you provide and repairs you train the staff on, is a more interesting possibility. Only relatively standardized, mature, offerings would be viable; but if you happen to be one of the big 'cloud' types who needs to run ten zillion instances of the same thing at the absolute lowest cost...

Re:Vendor response time

[Terje Mathisen]

Looking at the map (select "Ballangen" and then "Harstad/Narvik Airport, Evenes") it is very obvious that any urgent air freight or express service visit will fly to Evenes and then get a fast boat ride across the fjord, the distance is just ~15 km (i.e. less than 10 miles) or just 4 km across the fjord to the closest road.

The time for this would be under 30 min for the total transfer, and if that isn't fast enough then you'd use one of the helicopters at the airport, stationed there for the oil industry.

I was an architect for the largest (at the time) data center in Norway, located in Fet relatively close to the main Oslo airport. I would be far more worried about some other issues here:

a) Latency: "Bandwidth is cheap but latency is forever." There are effectively no customers/end users of this data center who would be located within say 1000 km. OTOH the situation is almost as bad for the Luleå data center over in Sweden, so not an absolute show stopper.

b) Redundancy. As the article stated, pretty much _all_ the fiber runs go along the iron ore railway line from Narvik to Kiruna in Sweden, so a single backhoe accident would cut all of them. For our Fet data center we had totally independent fiber and power runs entering the site from opposite sides, and we had to make sure that they had no common routing anywhere until reaching a large exchange point. (During planning we found that the two separate fiber vendors selected had their main routes sharing a single culvert at one point on the way to Oslo, so this had to be fixed.)

Terje

Re:Brilliant idea

[Ashtead]

There is no permafrost in this area. This is built on bedrock, and close to the coast.

Re:What about

[Ashtead]

Fiber is already there, along the railway line from Narvik and eastwards. There is no permafrost in this area, most of it is sea and bedrock, within which the mines were located. As for distance, even a large town such as Tromsø is further north and further away from the rest of Europe.

Re: Number of issues cross my mind..

[Anonymous Coward]

> Power generation.
Plenty of hydro power here.

>Latency.
We have fiber, and experience very low latency to central europe. At home I have 500/500Mbit fiber which in speed test deliver as promised. And no datacap btw.

>Heat generation which will advance ice sheet melting. Fiber lines on permafrost.
This isn't the north pole or anything like that. No permafrost, an tempatures ranging from 30 degree celcius on good summer days to -20 on the worst days of winter.

>Skilled workers willing to live in Antartica.
No need for those, antarctica is on the oposite side of the globe.

>Oh, and Marijuana availability. Data center admins love to smoke.
Never been a problem (except around christmas, seems like the dealers enjoy some time of with their families)

Re:What about

[networkBoy]

A huge amount of the data processing going on is not very latency sensitive once the stream starts, even if jitter sensitive (e.g. Netflix movie). If they court the market for "nearline" compute at a cost that is highly competitive to the national colo server farms (colo in this case meaning DC resident in-country) then I could see them doing quite well.

As others have noted, Fiber is there, as is foundation.

My concern would be actual physical access to personnel, particularly vendor support, though the latter could be mitigated by the vendor simply storing spares on-site, but not accessible to the DC until activated, at which time the failing unit would be taken off-line and shipped slow-boat back to the vendor.

There is already some level of precedent for this where Intel allows the largest consumers to pick the sku of the CPU *after* it's already on the motherboard, but while still on the assembly line. Fuse blows and sku is locked in. They then pay Intel the price based on the counts. This lets the likes of Dell react much faster to demand.

Re:How do they handle winter power generation?

[Applehu Akbar]

This is also a region where any waste heat from industrial processes can be used as district heating. Heat stored in water can be piped an amazing distance without much heat 'leakage'.