Hacker News Reader

Comment by jankeymeulen | Hacker News Reader

> Google has announced plans to do the same.

Citation needed? IMHO putting a datacentre under water is a horrible idea, why not pump the water 10 meters higher and cool a DC near the shoreline?

View on HN

Continuously pumping sea water is expensive to maintain, the primary reason being marine biology. I once saw mussels grew inside a boat engine.

Second reason, land on shorelines is expensive. Many people dream about living on a seaside (except for people who did, practically speaking the idea is not that great, humidity, noise). Also many other businesses require shorelines, beaches, marinas, ports.

Pumping water from a lake seems more reasonable..

>why not pump the water 10 meters higher and cool a DC near the shoreline?

Google's already doing that -- http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2010/09/15/googl...

As for the Google's undersea data center plans, I'm unable to find a citation for you at the moment, but I'm fairly certain that it's in the works.

That sea water cooling DC recently became available as the GCP region europe-north1: "Our high-tech cooling system, which uses sea water from the Gulf of Finland, reduces energy use and is the first of its kind." https://cloud.google.com/about/locations/finland/

Exactly. Full submersion seems to add a lot of complication for little gain over just submersing your heat exchangers. I guess you can avoid some moving parts (and heat generation) by letting wave action circulate your cooling fluid, but that's a small fraction of the energy needed to run a datacenter.

The tradeoff is the need for watertight seals all around your datacenter (including the doors and cable access), dealing with corrosion over a larger surface area, accessibility problems, dealing with marine life (barnacles!), anchoring it against storms, environmental impact, and so on.

IMHO it is a silly idea and won't prove practical in the long run.

Or just put it somewhere that's very dry and very windy and use air-cooling? There are a couple of cold deserts that fit the bill that aren't too far latency-wise from users and are nice for solar power.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com