Information Center

Green data center is a gimmick or an opportunity

  

Now is the time for people to rethink the application of green data centers. In the past few months, there have been some new news about the concept of Microsoft's underwater data center; And Stockholm, Sweden's data center uses the waste heat of the server to warm and comfort the local residents: "edge" computing will replace the voice familiarity of the data center. People need to ignore these g-heads and see that IBM is committed to artificial intelligence and quantum computing research.

Microsoft's underwater data center Natick project has been tested, and several servers are deployed in the sealed cabin. Its natural cooling is to directly cool the heat exchanger through seawater, so long as it is anchored to the proper depth of the seabed, it can obtain power and optical fiber. Before sealing, the oxygen, water vapor and dust in the sealed tank are sucked out, providing a near pure environment for electronic devices, and it is cleaner and easier to maintain than conventional air conditioning units. Therefore, people should see higher reliability and longer uptime, rather than deploying data centers on land.

Engineers familiar with this concept envision creating a longer server pipeline that can form a server farm or data center park. Due to the use of seawater cooling, the power requirement is low, and the lower real estate cost allows the server facilities to be far away from land (but through ship transportation and underwater treatment), rather than building an onshore facility to connect everything with offshore renewable energy sources, such as wind power plants or electricity generated by tides, waves or tides.

Biological contamination on heat exchangers is still an outstanding issue. If algae and other marine organisms continue to grow on the heat exchanger, the energy efficiency will decrease and the temperature will increase. If the heat is too fast, the electronics will shut down. The heat exchanger used to clean the underwater sealed cabin is very inconvenient and expensive. And people want submarine facilities near the coast, as easy as using land facilities.

Stockholm Data Park provides "natural" cooling by providing waste heat from the data center to the heating system in Stockholm. Its long-term goal is to meet 10% of the heating demand of urban residential buildings through the excess heat recovered from the data center. In this way, a large number of servers are needed to generate heat, which consumes about 10 megawatts of renewable energy, and these data center facilities have not been built before the local families get "cooling services".

The recent speculation about the edge seems to be the reform of micro data center, which is driven by the 5G technology marketing craze this time. Edge computing cannot eliminate the size of the centralized data center economy, nor can it meet the needs of large-scale data storage and analysis of centralized data, nor does it require regular access to expensive resources, such as artificial intelligence and quantum computing.

Let's enter IBM's computing world through quantum computing. IBM's Watson technology has transformed machine learning from science fiction to mainstream applications within a few years. The company plans to do the same with quantum computing for commercial and scientific applications. Recently, the company announced its roadmap, which will provide API tools and SDKs for using quantum based resources, providing developers and programmers with a way to start building code between traditional computers and quantum computers.

IBM announced that people can try its free "Watson" cloud data analysis service. IBM's Q system will use commercial hardware of about 50 qubits and is expected to be available at some time in the next few years. Its hardware needs to be kept in an environment close to absolute zero to meet the needs of quantum science, so people will not be on the edge of computing or in the underwater data center of this hardware application soon.

The focus of the data center is to stay ahead by constantly pursuing cutting-edge technology. People don't have to worry about the lack of technical G head this time, because there will be a new start in the next three months.