(June 6, 2018 at 10:43 am)Mathilda Wrote: Working link here:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-44368813
I must say I'm intrigued.
The point is that any savings you make scale up as you get much larger data farms. If you have to pump water in to cool your computers then it won't be as efficient because it takes energy to pump the water, which also produces heat. If you have it underwater then you don't need to pump any water or air and rely on tidal power instead.
The problem is though if that a single component fails then the entire server is unusable. They're saying that in an oxygen free environment this is less likely to happen but I'm sceptical because components don't just fail for environmental reasons but because they weren't built properly in the factory. So whether it actually saves money is unknown.
What is the mean time between failure of the system inside each container? It is not that components can’t fail. It is that if meantime between failure is long, then the loss of a small percentage of these self-contained underwater computing capsules may not offset the cost of energy savings.
Also, why can’t the container not be pulled up for servicing?
