Comment by skybrian 4 days ago
Google’s paper [1] does talk about radiation hardening and thermal management. Maybe their ideas are naive and it’s a bad paper? I’m not an expert so I couldn’t tell from a brief skim.
It does sound to me like other concepts that Google has explored and shelved, like building data centers out of shipping container sized units and building data centers underwater.
[1] https://services.google.com/fh/files/misc/suncatcher_paper.p...
Pedantically, Microsoft has actually submerged datacenters (UDC). Google's only tried pumping seawater for cooling.
Apparently Microsoft tried it and it worked, but they shelved it?
https://www.tomshardware.com/desktops/servers/microsoft-shel...
It didn't work, it was an utterly terrible idea and they are almost certainly lying about the sentiment that it "worked". No ability to perform maintenance is a complete nonstarter. Communications and power is a nightmare to get right. The thermal management story sucks - just because you have metal touching water doesn't mean you have effective radiation of heat. Actually scaling it up is nearly impossible because you need thicker and more expensive vessels the bigger it gets. The problems go on and on.
They claim it did.
Microsoft finds underwater datacenters are reliable, practical and use energy sustainably - https://news.microsoft.com/source/features/sustainability/pr...
> Among the components crated up and sent to Redmond are a handful of failed servers and related cables. The researchers think this hardware will help them understand why the servers in the underwater datacenter are eight times more reliable than those on land.
> “We are like, ‘Hey this looks really good,’” Fowers said. “We have to figure out what exactly gives us this benefit.”
> The team hypothesizes that the atmosphere of nitrogen, which is less corrosive than oxygen, and the absence of people to bump and jostle components, are the primary reasons for the difference. If the analysis proves this correct, the team may be able to translate the findings to land datacenters.
> “Our failure rate in the water is one-eighth of what we see on land,” Cutler said. “I have an economic model that says if I lose so many servers per unit of time, I’m at least at parity with land,” he added. “We are considerably better than that.”
The only sentence in the whole "paper" about cooling is
> Cooling would be achieved through a thermal system of heat pipes and radiators while operating at nominal temperatures
Which is kind of similar to writing a paper about building a bridge over the Pacific and saying "The bridge would be strong enough by being built out of steel". Like you can say it, but that doesn't magically make it true.