| ▲ | skybrian 14 hours 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... |
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| ▲ | adgjlsfhk1 4 hours ago | parent | next [-] |
| 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. |
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| ▲ | fragmede 14 hours ago | parent | prev [-] |
| Pedantically, Microsoft has actually submerged datacenters (UDC). Google's only tried pumping seawater for cooling. |
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| ▲ | skybrian 13 hours ago | parent [-] | | Apparently Microsoft tried it and it worked, but they shelved it? https://www.tomshardware.com/desktops/servers/microsoft-shel... | | |
| ▲ | creatonez 8 hours ago | parent [-] | | 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. | | |
| ▲ | skybrian 6 hours ago | parent [-] | | Presumably it didn't work well or they wouldn't have shelved it. But do you actually know about what happened or is this all based on your priors? | | |
| ▲ | wmf 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | I don't think MS ever revealed enough information to answer that. For example, I haven't seen any explanation of how heat is transferred from the servers to the skin of the container. I can guess how they did it but I don't want to make any judgement based on guesses. |
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