I heard about this on BBC World News this morning on my way into work. I
waas going to share this here myself this morning.
What isn't clear is how the heat is being transferred from the CPUs to
the seawater. My best guess at the moment is that the capsule's steel
walls conduct heat from the hot air (nitrogen gas, actually), to the
seawater, cooling the ambient "air", and then the air is circulated just
using the chassis fans. It's possible there are some supplemental fans
to circulate air around the capsule, but based on the photos of the
racks being loaded into the capsule, it doesn't look like there'd be
much room for that. This would mean the processors are still air-cooled
themselves.
Has anybody seen any more details on how the cooling actually occurs
withing the capsule?
What is interesting is that these servers are all equipped with FPGAs:
Payload
12 racks containing 864 standard Microsoft datacenter servers with
FPGA acceleration and 27.6 petabytes of disk. This Natick datacenter
is as powerful as several thousand high end consumer PCs and has
enough storage for about 5 million movies.
Since they are equipped with FPGAs, it doesn't sound like they're doing
routine workloads, so this technique might not be transferable to you or
me. I'm assuming the FPGAs will get much better performance per watt
than a general processor, reducing the heatload in the capsule vs. doing
the same workload with only x86 processors. Does any one know what the
intended workload of this system is?
On 06/06/2018 08:16 AM, John Hearns via Beowulf wrote:
https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-44368813
https://natick.research.microsoft.com/
I must admit my first thoughts on hearing an item about this on Radio
Scotland is that now that humans have laid waste to the surface of the
Earth we are going to boil the oceans.
My second thought is for the poor HPC engineer who will have to be
equipped with a wetsuit and fins to do maintenance.
Actually looks like Microsoft have very sensibly filled the thing with
a dried nitrogen gas, which makes a lot of sense. And it is supposed
to be maintenance free, I would imagine any degraded servers will just
be switched off.
Prof Ian Bitterlin says "You just end up with a warmer sea and bigger
fish,"
I have told the tale on here before about the town I grew up in which
had a huge Singer factory. The factory had its own power station which
discharged hot water into the local canal. The canal was famous for
having foot long goldfish.
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