Lesson 25. Data Centers

Data Centers and Tiny Robots

Lesson 25

Microsoft declares its underwater data center test was a success

Underwater pods can reduce latency by moving cloud services closer to customers

The Northern Isles, a 12-rack / 864-server underwater data center pod, is winched off the seafloor in this picture after its two-year trial deployment.

Introduction

Microsoft retrieved a 40-foot-long, 12-rack, self-contained underwater data center from its seafloor home offshore from the Orkney Islands earlier this summer.

The retrieval of the Northern Isles began the final phase of Microsoft's Project Natick research initiative, exploring the concept of deploying sealed server pods just offshore major population centers as a replacement for traditional onshore data centers.

Multiple Choice

What are Northern Lights intended to replace?

• offshore pods

• onshore data centers

• all data centers in the world

• nothing at all

Why put servers underwater?

The potential disadvantage of sealed underwater "data centers" is obvious—they must be extremely reliable, since they can't be serviced on a regular basis. There is a somewhat less intuitive, counterbalancing advantage, of course—they don't have any pesky humans wandering around inside them, potentially dislodging cables, unplugging things, or otherwise injecting chaos.

Seafloor-based pods don't require expensive commercial real estate, and they get nearly free cooling from the surrounding tons of seawater. It takes significant time and specialized effort to acquire and develop commercial real estate for a traditional data center in a major city—building a sealed pod and deploying it on the seafloor nearby is simpler and faster.

Multiple Choice

What are the advantages of the sealed underwater data centers?

• free cooling

• no real estate expenses

• no human error

• all of the above

Retrieving the Northern Isles

The Northern Isles underwater data center pod was built by Naval Group (a defense and renewable marine energy contractor) and is locally supported by Green Marine, an Orkney Island-based marine engineering and operations firm. It spent two years beneath the water at the European Marine Energy Centre, where tidal currents peak at 9mph and storm waves reach 60 feet or more.

Both deployment and retrieval of the Northern Isles needed particularly calm weather and a full day of careful work involving robots and winches between the pontoons of a gantry barge. In the course of the pod's two years underwater, it acquired a coating of algae and barnacles, as well as cantaloupe-sized sea anemones colonizing sheltered nooks in its base.

Multiple Choice

What was the weather like during the retrieval of the Northern Lights?

• it was calm

• there was a storm

• there was algae

• there were strong currents

Analyzing the results

Before sliding the 12-rack, 864-server data center unit out of the pod's hull, Microsoft's researchers took internal air samples from the still-sealed pod for analysis in Redmond. "We left it filled with dry nitrogen, so the environment is pretty benign in there," Microsoft Special Projects researcher Spencer Fowers said. Analysis of the air after the two-year deployment will give the team additional information about cable and other equipment outgassing.

Multiple Choice

What was the pod filled with before submersion?

• Air

• Oxygen

• Nytrogen

• Hydrogen

• Helium

Analyzing the results

The servers deployed aboard the Northern Isles failed at a rate approximately one-eighth what experts would expect from the same servers in a traditional, human-serviced data center over the same period. Microsoft's team hypothesizes that this is partly due to the sealed, inert nitrogen atmosphere the pod was pressurized with before deployment.

Without any oxygen for human technicians to breathe or excessive humidity for their comfort, there are fewer opportunities for chemical corruption of components. Lack of bumping and jostling by those same human operators likely also contributed to the servers' unusually low failure rate.

Multiple Choice

What was the Northern Lights failure rate?

• lower than that of onshore data centers

• higher than that of onshore data centers

• the same as that of onshore data centers

• all of the servers failed

• none of the servers failed

Sustainability and efficiency

The successful two-year deployment of the Northern Isles demonstrates the feasibility of greener, more sustainable power initiatives for data centers, above and beyond the efficiency of cooling the data center itself.

One reason the Project Natick team deployed the Northern Isles to the Orkney Islands is because its grid is supplied 100 percent by wind, solar, and experimental green technologies under development at the European Marine Energy Centre itself. "We have been able to run really well on what most land-based data centers consider an unreliable grid," Fowers said.

Multiple Choice

What powered the underwater data center?

• wind

• sun

• experimental green technologies

• all of the above

Sustainability and efficiency

Ben Cutler, a project manager for Project Natick, believes that co-located offshore wind farms could viably power production deployments similar to the Northern Isles. Even light wind conditions would likely be enough to power the pods, with a shore powerline bundled in with the pod's fiber-optic data cabling as a last resort. Cutler also notes that the seawater cooling for such deployments isn't just cheaper than traditional cooling—it leaves freshwater resources vital to humans and wildlife untapped.

Multiple Choice

Can there be power cable coonecting the pod to the shore?

• No

• Yes, bundled with fiber optic cables

• Yes, independent from fiber optic cables

• Yes, instead of the fiber optic cables

Additional Questions

Why should we care about underwater data centers?

Are these pods sustainable in the long run?

What are the downsides to this approach?

Multiple Choice

Can there be power cable coonecting the pod to the shore?

• No

• Yes, bundled with fiber optic cables

• Yes, independent from fiber optic cables

• Yes, instead of the fiber optic cables

Multiple Choice

What's so great about rotifer?

• It's a tiny robot

• It can be used to build tiny robots

• It means tiny functional machines can be built

• It is so tiny, it cannot live outside the lab

Multiple Choice

From whom can engineers steal to build tiny robots?

• From Picasso

• From each other

• From semiconductor industry

• From consumer electronics

Multiple Choice

What was NOT among the advantages of a smartphone legless robot?

• Large screen

• Small size to fit in your hand

• Communication capabilities

• Intelligence

Multiple Choice

How are OWICs produced?

• En masse

• By soldering each one by hand

• By 3D printing

• They are grown, like crystals

Multiple Choice

What were the demands for OWIC's legs?

• low power

• low voltage

• small size

• all of the above

Multiple Choice

What are the actuators made from?

• water

• gold

• plainum

• silver

Multiple Choice

Why did they not show the process of releasing the tiny robots from the plate?

• Because they would need a lot of power

• Because the process requires nasty chemicals

• Because they are afraid of robots taking over the White House

• Because no one would be able to see anything

Multiple Choice

What makes the tiny robots move?

• Application of small voltage

• Switching laser point between solar panels

• Charging the solar panels

• It's alive!

Multiple Choice

What was NOT on the list of possible future uses of tiny robots?

• DJing a party for microscopic robots

• Tiny robots fighting cancer one cell at a time

• Robots living on crops to fight pests

• Taking over the world with a tiny army

Open Ended

Did you enjoy a look at the process of building a tiny robot?

What would you do with a jar of robots that would come with your smartphone?

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