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<p>I heard about this on BBC World News this morning on my way into
work. I waas going to share this here myself this morning. <br>
</p>
<p>What isn't clear is how the heat is being transferred from the
CPUs to the seawater. My best guess at the moment is that the
capsule's steel walls conduct heat from the hot air (nitrogen gas,
actually), to the seawater, cooling the ambient "air", and then
the air is circulated just using the chassis fans. It's possible
there are some supplemental fans to circulate air around the
capsule, but based on the photos of the racks being loaded into
the capsule, it doesn't look like there'd be much room for that.
This would mean the processors are still air-cooled themselves. <br>
</p>
<p>Has anybody seen any more details on how the cooling actually
occurs withing the capsule? <br>
</p>
<p>What is interesting is that these servers are all equipped with
FPGAs: <br>
</p>
<p>
<blockquote type="cite">
<h4>Payload</h4>
12 racks containing 864 standard Microsoft datacenter servers
with FPGA acceleration and 27.6 petabytes of disk. This Natick
datacenter is as powerful as several thousand high end consumer
PCs and has enough storage for about 5 million movies. </blockquote>
</p>
<p>Since they are equipped with FPGAs, it doesn't sound like they're
doing routine workloads, so this technique might not be
transferable to you or me. I'm assuming the FPGAs will get much
better performance per watt than a general processor, reducing the
heatload in the capsule vs. doing the same workload with only x86
processors. Does any one know what the intended workload of this
system is? <br>
</p>
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<div class="moz-cite-prefix">On 06/06/2018 08:16 AM, John Hearns via
Beowulf wrote:<br>
</div>
<blockquote type="cite"
cite="mid:CAPqNE2XO0xcGOxe83XUhGnBnspXZ+S67_bTxrSkk03JWFeSbSg@mail.gmail.com">
<div dir="ltr">
<div><a href="https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-44368813"
moz-do-not-send="true">https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-44368813</a></div>
<div><br>
</div>
<div><a href="https://natick.research.microsoft.com/"
moz-do-not-send="true">https://natick.research.microsoft.com/</a><br>
</div>
<div><br>
</div>
<div>I must admit my first thoughts on hearing an item about
this on Radio Scotland is that now that humans have laid waste
to the surface of the Earth we are going to boil the oceans.</div>
<div>My second thought is for the poor HPC engineer who will
have to be equipped with a wetsuit and fins to do maintenance.</div>
<div><br>
</div>
<div>Actually looks like Microsoft have very sensibly filled the
thing with a dried nitrogen gas, which makes a lot of sense.
And it is supposed to be maintenance free, I would imagine any
degraded servers will just be switched off.</div>
<div><br>
</div>
<div>Prof Ian Bitterlin says "You just end up with a warmer sea
and bigger fish,"</div>
<div>I have told the tale on here before about the town I grew
up in which had a huge Singer factory. The factory had its own
power station which discharged hot water into the local canal.
The canal was famous for having foot long goldfish.</div>
<div><br>
</div>
<div><br>
</div>
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</blockquote>
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