Microsoft's underwater data centre - Page 1
Forum section: electronics / general

author: JohnnyMalaria
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: June 12, 2018, 04:32:04 am
content: Pretty cool, literally.https://www.bbc.com/news/av/technology-44382659/microsoft-s-underwater-data-centre

author: Halcyon
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: June 12, 2018, 05:13:29 am
content: I guess it's kind of cool (keeping the pun going), but you wouldn't want to have a disk fail and require replacement, I suppose you could always send the trainee down there ;-)

author: Berni
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: June 12, 2018, 05:14:47 am
content: Its actually quite difficult to use heat from servers in a useful way. About the best you can do is send the hot air trough a office building to keep it warm in winter, but what do you do with it in the summer?IBM had an idea over here to use there servers to help heat the water a near by swimming complex. Not sure how efficient the whole thing was but they said it worked.The main issue is that servers like to run in a room temperature environment and usually to get useful heat you need it to be significantly hotter. If you can get water nice and hot then you can send it trough pipes to wherever you want the heat, if you get it even hotter then you get steam that is even more useful. But the server components aren't happy running at such high temperatures.

author: bd139
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: June 12, 2018, 07:16:18 am
content: I always thought this is the wrong end of the problem. Rather than working out how to get rid of all of that heat, making less of it should be a commercial priority. The overheads of computing these days are pretty extreme. I reckon you could shave 40% of energy and therefore heat dissipation requirements off through applying computer science and electrical engineering to the problem. Unfortunately most of the compute workloads in azure and AWS where this idea would benefit are from shitty software stacks a mile deep which require very high equipment density to run. Every VM on VM on VM type environment is a nightmare. Repeated dynamic translation and compilation on millions of nodes at a time happens daily over and over again.Every line of code and algorithm should have a measured efficiency in joules. Every hardware platform should have a relative multiplier for this and be graded on it. Every company should be accountable for their efficiency.

author: Berni
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: June 12, 2018, 07:27:37 am
content: Yeah the inefficient way things are done on the web is another thing.Web services are always layers upon layers of abstraction running on VMs that run inside VMs. Not only is the stuff layers deep but quite often human readable text is used to communicate between systems or even between the layers.Just the way websites load is a prime example. It opens a TCP/IP port to the server, they do a dance in human readable ASCII before the server barfs the file contents across. The browser looks at it and finds it needs a CSS style sheet so the whole thing is repeated for that. Then it repeats again for the font file in the css, then repeats 10 times to load in the .js scripts, then repeats 50 times to load all the images, then the .js scripts start executing and fetch some json data in the same manner...etc.. about 100 to 1000 TCP/IP connections opened and closed later the browser now has everything that it needs to fully render the page.

author: bd139
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: June 12, 2018, 07:32:38 am
content: The web is the worse. There’s a lot of caching going on but the compute I worry more about is the generation, parsing, virtual machines at both ends, rendering, layout engine etc. The prime offender on a client machine for energy consumption is the browser.I’d rather have gopher and postscript files at this point. Postscript was fast and efficient on very modest hardware.

author: Berni
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: June 12, 2018, 07:55:11 am
content: Well yes the software that generates the page on the server side is even worse.But how a web browser fetches a page is a good example of how inefficiently designed the web is. All this massive wave of opening and closing connections also puts a strain on things other than the ARM powered tablet running the browser. Routers have to get this data to the destination and they have to process every connection separately. The server has to keep track of a massive number of TCP/IP connections and that takes resources.The people that created all of these web technologies come from a purely software field and are used to have there stuff run on modern PCs and servers that have essentially infinite resources. Until you have to generate that webpage 1000s of times per second to serve the users.

author: bd139
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: June 12, 2018, 08:37:45 am
content: Yep when you have 100,000 requests in flight each thread looks like it’s running on a 386SX25Why we went for ZeroMQ and MessagePack for our internal transport. Channels are persistent and you run an n:n mesh between API and storage backends. No connection overhead, low latency and low throughput. Only problem is we had to write it in C++Front end is shitty. I’m not even going there. Not my banana not my monkey.

author: bitwelder
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: June 12, 2018, 09:47:09 am
content: Another Microsoft sinking project!

author: Halcyon
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: June 12, 2018, 12:52:10 pm
content: Quote from: bd139 on June 12, 2018, 08:37:45 amHey, if it's good enough for space flight ;-)

author: Gyro
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: September 14, 2020, 09:55:12 pm
content: She's back on the surface! Apparently Data centres are more reliable in a cool Nitrogen atmosphere and without humans around...Quotehttps://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-54146718

author: eti
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: September 14, 2020, 10:02:26 pm
content: Warming up the oceans? <slow clap for them as they can get away with it as they pay people off>