Iceland looks to serve the world. | Hacker News Reader

Iceland looks to serve the world.

news.bbc.co.uk

64 pointsbrg34 comments

Do you really want to build your data center on top of 130 volcanoes?

The island has about 130 volcanic mountains, of which 18 have erupted since the settlement of Iceland. Over the past 500 years, Iceland's volcanoes have erupted a third of the total global lava output. - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volcanism_of_Iceland

True, but you've gotta figure that "our datacenter was swallowed by a volcanic eruption" is at least a cooler excuse than "DFW is having weird power issues". If you must go dark, go dark in style! (And keep a good eye some off-site backups).

They also have a lot of earthquakes.

But then, Japan has lots of earthquakes and quite a bit of storms and rain and people still live there. There are also regular devastating hurricanes in the Caribbean and the south-east USA and people also still live there!

Isn't the San Francisco area prone to earthquakes too?

Yes, big fat ones.

I am glad Europe is as boring as it is.

I'm thinking this is going to be more for "batch compute" type operations where you'd probably have data replicated across multiple sites and the latency won't impact the job significantly.

I was thinking of shared hosting for all those little web sites too. They must add up to a lot of power/cooling

The volcanic nature of Iceland can also be seen in Þingvellir, where the North American and Eurasian continental plates can be seen as a canyon.

http://de.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Datei:Iceland_Mid-...

I can't recall ever hearing about a volcano on Iceland threatening people, though.

The earthquakes are probably a bigger problem, since they affect a larger area don't all occur in specific locations. Design the building properly and even that shouldn't be a big problem.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eldfell

5,300 had to be evacuated from the island of Heimaey due to an eruption in 1973.

In 1783 the Laki volcano killed about a quarter of the Icelandic population, due to both poisoning and an ensuing famine. That volcano also appeared to have global climate effects:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laki

A couple of problems: Iceland is small so although it has an image as a cool sensible safe Scandinavian country it wouldn't take many voters to put in a far right/far left president who might screw up your business model.

Do you know the details of Icelandic law? Does your corporate lawyers? Your regulation compliance officers? How many Icelandic Intelectual Property specialists can you hire tomorrow? There is a reason that banks have HQs in London/New York - they have a few hundred years of case law that they understand.

Iceland is bankrupt, which means it is under thumb of the IMF which means it will do whatever Washington says. Do you want your data to be ruled officially by Reykjavik but unofficially by MPIA/RIAA/Whoever says.

Um, so you basically claim that smaller countries tend to have more often more extreme governments? I don't think this is the case. And why wouuld it?

Icelanders vote for sane middle of the road goverments. Even during the financial crisis (which hit Iceland disproportionately) they didn't go extreme. Why would it be easy to change that? Easier than with larger countries?

It shouldn't be too much of an issue considering Iceland is going to eventually join the EU.

Austria is in the EU, would you trust Jörg Haider with your gay rights mailing list?

That would be a highly suspicious situation, considering the fact that J. Haider died in a car accident more than a year ago.

Considering he was gay and is now dead I would say the answer is yes :-)

But I know what you mean and you are right, the EU doesn't prevent rabid populism. Interestingly though, it's the mainstream parties in the EU who aggressively pursue all kinds of privacy intrusions and surveillance madness.

That particular list, yes.

That's certainly a plus because you have a court to go to, but tax law is national law in the EU.

I like the idea that the internet will be plugged in and powered by the earths own internal heat. It's like the virtual world and natural world becoming as one.

The duality is an illusion. Free your mind.

A company would save greater than half a million metric tons of carbon annually by putting their data center in Iceland.

A typical server uses 1 ton / year. Not many companies have more than half a million servers. Perhaps only about 2 companies.

Just how many data centers have even close to 100,000 machines in them? There can't be that many of them, but the article makes this sound commonplace. There are probably quite a few installations with 100's and 1000's of machines. Once you get into 5 digit numbers, you are starting to reach rarified heights.

The problem is in the explosive growth. The demand for computing power has grown dramatically over the last few years because of the shift to cloud computing and the fact that people are expecting "smarter and smarter" and "more and more" and "faster and faster." If Google had 10x the datacenter capacity, it could (theoretically) crawl the web 10x faster and return more up to date results.

If you really want to get picky though, more web crawling from Google means more energy usage on the other end of the line (the crawled server).

I just talked to a guy who's building a data center with 13 MW power input. I assume that includes air conditioning, so if a typical machine + overhead is 130 watts that's 100,000 machines. It might take a while before they fill that even half way.

I spent a month in iceland this summer and it is an amazing place. Beautiful landscapes, long nights in the winter/days in the summer, and it's sparsely populated. I'm not sure how great of an idea it is to put a bunch of data centers there, but I would love to figure out a way to colocate myself there. I feel very confident that they will find a way to recover from the unfortunate events of the past year.

Just don't go there in winter. The lack of sun can be depressing.

I was living in Canada last year and thinking the same idea in the freaking cold winter. I guess for North America it might be a better idea to put servers in the cold areas (e.g. Northwest Territories) in the same continent instead of running optic fibers under the ocean to Iceland and worried about earthquakes and volcanos ...

Not to mention sabotage and blackmail. "Pay me millions or I'll chop your cables". Hmmm, new meaning for the term "Hacker"...

I remember asking engineers at deCODE about building server centers in Iceland. They said it was too expensive to build and staff a server center and that there was no surplus bandwidth to depress costs. They said that limiting constraints for computing in Iceland were personnel, then logistics, then bandwidth ---not energy and cooling.

"And, in an irony not lost on a country brought to its knees by finance, one early customer rumoured to have signed a deal to move servers here is - well who else - one of America's biggest investment banks. "

This "server farm to save the world" story smells like spin for a dish-washing debt service ---probably because Iceland hates aluminum smelting and fears the imported masses who'd work there.

I think this is a great idea. Iceland needs a new industry and this just makes sense. Data centers are to the tech age as factories were to the industrial revolution.

The government can ensure/facilitate high speed fiber links to the continent and then let the rest take care of itself. As long as there is enough network capacity this should be a no-brainer.

One way we solve and the solution backfires later. But let's go with the greedy method for now.

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