Microsoft Plumbs Ocean’s Depths to Test Underwater Data Center

Taking a page from Jules Verne, Microsoft researchers believe that the future of data centers may be under the sea.

Microsoft has tested a prototype independent data center that can run hundreds of feet below the ocean surface, removing one of the most expensive problems in the technology industry: Bill air conditioning.

Data centers today, with all the power of streaming video to social networks and e-mail, containing thousands of servers that generate a lot of heat. When there is excess heat, noise servers.

Install the wheel into the cold ocean water could solve the problem. You can also respond to the increasing demand exponentially world of computing power, because Microsoft plans to link the system with either a turbine or a system of tidal power to produce electricity.

The effort, code-named Project Natick, could result in lines giant steel tubes connected by fiber optic cables placed on the seabed. Another possibility would be to suspend jelly beans into containers below the surface to catch with the ocean current turbines that generate electricity.

"When I heard this I thought, water ... electricity, why do that? '" Said Ben Cutler, a designer of Microsoft IT, which is one of the engineers working on the system Natick projects. "But think about it, it actually makes a lot of sense."

Such radical idea might encounter obstacles, including environmental concerns and unforeseen glitches. But researchers at Microsoft believe that mass production of the capsules, which could reduce the new data center deployment time two years now on earth for only 90 days, providing huge cost advantage.

Submarines server containers could also help make Web services work faster. Much of the world's population now lives in urban centers, near the sea, but far from the data center usually built in places off the beaten track with lots of space. The ability to place the power near the computer users reduces the delay or latency, experienced people, which is a big problem for Web users.

"For years, the major cloud providers have been looking for sites in the world, not only for green energy, but also benefit the environment," said Larry Smarr, a specialist in physical and computer scientist who is director of California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology at the University of California, San Diego.

Driven by technologies as diverse as digital entertainment and the rapid arrival of the so-called Internet of things, the demand for centralized computing has grown exponentially. Microsoft manages more than 100 data centers worldwide and is the addition at a rapid pace. The company spent more than $ 15 million in a system of global data center that now offers more than 200 online services.

In 2014, engineers in Microsoft's research arm known as new experiences and technologies, or next door, began to think about a new approach to greatly accelerate the process of adding new power to supposedly cloud computing systems.

"When you pull out your smartphone, you think you used this little miracle computer, but actually using more than 100 computers in this thing called the cloud," said Peter Lee, vice president of Microsoft Business Research and the following organization. "And then you multiply that by billions of people, and that's just an enormous amount of computer work."

The company recently completed a trial of 105 days of a steel capsule - eight feet in diameter - that stood 30 feet underwater in the Pacific Ocean off the coast of central California, near San Luis Obispo. Controlled from their offices here on the campus of Microsoft, the trial was more successful than expected.

The researchers had worried about hardware failures and leaks. The subsea system was equipped with 100 different sensors to measure pressure, humidity, movement and other conditions to better understand how to work in an environment where it is not possible to send a repairman in the middle of the night.

The delayed system. This led engineers to extend the time to experiment and even run both projects commercial data processing service in Microsoft Azure cloud.

The research group designing a submarine system that will be three times larger began. It will be built in partnership with a developer who has not yet chosen an alternative energy system based on the ocean. Microsoft engineers said they were awaiting a new trial to begin next year, perhaps near Florida or northern Europe, where large energy projects of the ocean current.

The first prototype, affectionately called Leona Philpot - a character from the game series Halo Microsoft - was returned, partly covered with barnacles, the company's corporate campus here.

There is a large white steel pipe covered with heat exchangers, with its ends closed by metal plates and screws large. Within a single data center rack computing bathing in the nitrogen pressure to effectively remove heat from the calculation chips while the system was tested on the ocean floor.

The idea for the wine submarine system research work written in 2014 by several employees of Microsoft data centers, including one with experience in a Navy submarine.

Norman A. Whitaker, general manager of special projects at Microsoft Research and former deputy director of DARPA in the Pentagon, or Darpa, said that the concept of server underwater is an example of what DARPA scientists call "refactoring" or completely rethink the way something that has traditionally been achieved.

Although large submarine pipe computing seems unlikely, the project could lead to other innovations, he said. For example, the new submarines capsules are designed to be left in place without maintenance for as long as five years. This means that the servers within the same must be robust enough to last as long without repairs.

It would be a stretch for most servers, but will have to improve to work in underwater capsule - some Microsoft engineers say they are working.

Also they are rethinking the alignment of physical data centers. Nowadays, servers are placed in racks so that they can be maintained by humans. But they do not require maintenance, many parts are there to help human interaction can be removed, Whitaker said.

"The idea is that refactoring tickles a lot of things at once," he said.

In the first experiment, researchers at Microsoft, said he studied the impact of its containers it could have on the fragile underwater environments. They used acoustic sensors to determine if the drives spinning and fans inside the steel container were heard in the surrounding water. What they found is that the snapping shrimp swimming with the system drowned out the noise created by the container.

One aspect of the project that the most obvious of electricity harvest seawater circulation potential. This could mean that there is a new energy is added to the sea and, therefore, n 'There is no heating at all, the researchers said. In his first experience, Microsoft engineers said they had measured a "very" small amount of local heating of the capsule.

"We measure unheated marine beyond a few inches of the ship means," said Dr. Lee.