[Beowulf] More about those underwater data centers

Lux, Jim (337K) James.P.Lux at jpl.nasa.gov
Mon Nov 5 10:29:00 PST 2018


It works, as do cooling liquids like Fluorinert - Oil is a few dollars a gallon, Fluorinert is a few hundred dollars/gallon. Fluorinert is "cleaner", and you can do some interesting things with "ebuliient" cooling (i.e. boiling).

FLuorinert is also, as the name implies, much more inert than oil.  Oil is a fairly good solvent for some things, so you have to pay attention to what's on your boards. Nothing much dissolves in Fluorinert, other than gases (you've all seen the mouse breathing "underwater")


Jim Lux
(818)354-2075 (office)
(818)395-2714 (cell)


-----Original Message-----
From: Beowulf [mailto:beowulf-bounces at beowulf.org] On Behalf Of Tony Brian Albers
Sent: Monday, November 05, 2018 12:17 AM
To: ghenriks at gmail.com; jaquilina at eagleeyet.net
Cc: beowulf at beowulf.org
Subject: Re: [Beowulf] More about those underwater data centers

Salt water is highly corrosive, that's why people use mineral or silicone oil.

I've heard of people trying to use power-transformer(the ones on electrical grid substations) oil, but I don't know if it worked.

/tony


On Mon, 2018-11-05 at 06:27 +0000, jaquilina at eagleeyet.net wrote:
> Probably a stupid question here,
> 
> What is the advantage of using salty sea water lets say over for 
> example mineral oil? I have seen on you tube these guys showing that a 
> pc will still run in a fish tank and all components submerged in 
> mineral oil?
> Yes it will be messier to change components but would the use of 
> mineral oil be more efficient?
> 
> 
> On 2018-11-04 14:10, Gerald Henriksen wrote:
> > On Sat, 3 Nov 2018 18:27:05 +0000, you wrote:
> > 
> > > I’m not sure there’s a huge population of Xcloud-Xbox gamers in 
> > > Orkney.  There's not much daylight this time of year, of course, 
> > > so maybe that's what those Orcadians are up to.
> > 
> > Likely just a convenient place for a second test unit.
> > 
> > In a way this is just an extension of the idea/product Sun came up 
> > wth where they put a datacentre in a shipping container with the 
> > idea that you could quickly get the datacentre where it was needed.
> > 
> > While I wouldn't say this won't fail, I think there is a lot of 
> > attraction to the concept given not just the time lag do build a 
> > traditional data centre (mentioned in the article), but even the 
> > cost of real estate in many/most places people live these days.  Do 
> > you, for one example, want to pay NYC rents or just throw a bunch of 
> > pods in the Hudson?
> > 
> > I guess once you accept the idea that we no longer maintain these 
> > datacentres in the traditional way - we now just let hardware fail 
> > in place and ignore it until it's time to replace all the hardware - 
> > moving to smaller sealed units doesn't seem to strange.
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--
--
Tony Albers
Systems Architect
Systems Director, National Cultural Heritage Cluster Royal Danish Library, Victor Albecks Vej 1, 8000 Aarhus C, Denmark.
Tel: +45 2566 2383 / +45 8946 2316
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