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Microsoft drops a data center into the sea to test feasibility of underwater cooling

By Koh Wanzi - on 2 Feb 2016, 10:18am

Microsoft drops a data center into the sea to test feasibility of underwater cooling

Microsoft Project Natick

Data centers make our world go round, quite literally. Modern data centers power everything from video streaming to our social networks and email, and while you wouldn’t be able to tell just by looking at them, those endless rows of computer servers generate huge amounts of heat. But researchers at Microsoft may have a novel solution for future facilities – they have just tested a prototype of a self-contained data center by dropping it beneath the surface of the Pacific Ocean.

The plan is actually brilliantly intuitive. What better way to fight heat than a whole lot of cold water? Of course, there are plenty of challenges. Water and electrical components don’t play well together, and the data center prototype – essentially a large, white steel tube – was covered with heat exchangers and sealed at its ends by metal plates and large bolts. It housed a single data center computing rack bathed in pressurized nitrogen to further help channel heat away from the computing chips while the system was in operation underwater.

The possibilities this could open up are tantalizing. For instance, Web services could work a lot faster. Many of the world’s major cities are located close to the coastline – and the ocean – but far away from out-of-the-way areas where data centers are usually built today. If underwater data centers pan out, they could be located near users in these coastal urban centers, which would lower the delay, or latency, that people experience.

The prototype, named Leona Philpot after a character in Halo, has since been returned to Microsoft’s Redmond campus after spending 105 days under 30 feet (around 10m) of ocean water.

The trial actually proved more successful than Microsoft had anticipated. Microsoft researchers had worried about hardware failures or leaks, but the system held up, which led engineers to extend the experiment and even run commercial data-processing projects from Microsoft’s Azure cloud computing service.

The entire effort has been codenamed Project Natick, and includes explorations into the possibility of pairing the system with either a turbine or tidal energy system to generate electricity to meet rapidly surging energy demands.

The researchers have already begun looking ahead – work has already started on the design of an underwater system that will be three times as large and built in collaboration with a developer of an ocean-based alternative-energy system. Microsoft engineers have pegged a new trial for 2017, possibly near Florida or in Northern Europe, where extensive ocean energy projects are currently underway.

Source: Microsoft Research via The New York Times

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