Datacenter architect creates bonkers designs to illustrate the craft, and quirks, of building bit barns Charles Fortin can't get excited by 30-storey skyscrapers. The Sydney-based architect studied at the Illinois Institute of Technology, which specializes in tall buildings, and learned that designing skyscrapers is all about determining how to get services – power and water, mostly – to the people who need them. "Forty storeys …
I like the first one, but the Engineer in me, immediately started asking why aren't they using the roof for solar panels if it's out in the outback???
One of the major issues that everyone forgets with sticking projects in the outback is that it's a very long way from anywhere - to drive from Darwin to Adelaide is about the same as driving from Lisbon to Warsaw. Stick something in the middle of that and you've got a long drive to get there from either end. (That's even assuming you've chosen something on the Stuart Highway, and not somewhere even more remote). Building costs are going to be massive as you need to bring everything to the build site, along with all of the builders, who will need accommodation whilst you're building (so add more cost for their accommodation, food, travel away on weekends, etc.). Once you're up and running, you need to pay for people to staff the site, and they're definitely going to be charging a premium for being stuck out in the middle of a desert. You're also going to need to sort accommodation for them, as even if you choose a relatively large town to be nearby, like Alice Springs, it's unlikely there will be enough empty housing to accommodate all your datacentre staff, so yep you are going to have sort something out there. Even if a lot can be done online these days, you still need a physical presence onsite - security, people to look after hardware, etc. After all, having staff drive a dozen hours (or more!) to get to your facitlity to fix something is not going to keep your customers happy. Also getting spares, etc. will be a slow and expensive delivery problem, so you're going to have to keep a lot of spare hardware on site...
Outback facilities, sound great on paper, cheap land, not likely to be damaged through flood or fire or any of the other myriad natural (or man-made) disasters that could affect other Datacenters, but the costs involved with building and running one would be massive....
"why aren't they using the roof for solar panels if it's out in the outback?"
My first question as well. Also, is the power generated from the roof going to be enough to operate the cooling, particularly since the outside temperature is going to have a very small difference to the hot air inside.
"a ring of solar panels around its equator for power all month long!"
Moon's equator is over 10,000 km. A 100 m wide strip of solar panels all around would be 1000 sqkm. Even considering only 1/4 at a time will be in sunlight that is high enough on the horizon, and solar panels at 25% efficiency, with , that would provide a constant 62.5 GW (solar irradiance on moon surface 1kW/sqm = 1GW/sqkm).
That should be enough to power a few moon bases!!!
Talking about solar cells on a roof to generate power.. Blackfriars rail station in London was refurbished to have entrances either side of the river Thames.
The new roof is covered in solar cells. The power they generate powers the lights for the station. All well and good of course.
But 100 ton trains need a good deal more power than that. I would expect the same thing for data centres. You might be able to power the lights and staff areas, but not racks of servers using roof mounted solar cells.
I like his designs BUT they are mostly IMPRACTICAL! We have a four square km (43 Million square feet) data centre in our remote Northern British Columbia, Canada data centre site that is entirely underground inside of a mountain and we had to custom construct a Cyanobacteria plus iron oxide catalyst seawater-hydrogen extracting system that can power our Ballard-style fuel cells (250 KW output for each box) which supply the GIGAWATTS of power needed for our vast arrays of GaAs on Borosilicate Combined-CPU/GPU/DSP/Vector superchips.
The amount of power consumed is phenomenal and we had to build an entire pipeline quite a distance under rugged terrain just to get seawater in for the hydrogen fuel cells and cooling system! His designs are "Pretty" on an artistic basis but for actual working datacentres, rows and rows of racks in block-sized buildings above-surface-or-underground is best! You just CANNOT get around the laws of physics and thermodynamics as they are immutable. To save space, you build and stack gear in blocks (i.e. rectangles and squares!). To cool them adequately, you need a LIQUID for thermal transfer (i.e. Silicone Oil in our case transferred from the fuel-cell created water which is then radiated to the local underground mountain rock environment via multiple fully underground 260,000 Gallon Swimming Pools at 10 metres by 10 Metres by 10 Metres each!) and a way to radiate the waste heat to the outer environment without it AFFECTING said outer environment (i.e. for stealth hiding purposes and for keeping negative local environmental thermal affects to a minimum!)
For home supercomputing setups (i.e. multiple GPU cards on 4-slot and 6-slot PCI-4 motherboards), I would use full-immersion bath cooling using a dialectric liquid (i.e. Silicone Oil or high purity Mineral Oil) and rack the MOBOs in thick-walled plastic boxes to keep those mobos and CPU/GPU chips fully submerged and cool! A typical 240 volts at 30 amps circuit gives you 7200 watts so you can rack five AMD Epyc MOBOs with 4 GPUs each (20 GPU cards total) in that amount of electricty for about 500 TeraFlops of DIY (Do It Yourself) 32-bits wide home supercomputing floating point number crunching horsepower! With THAT MUCH number crunching horsepower you could do Aerodynamic, Thermaldynamic, Electrodynamic, Plasmadynamic and Fluid Dynamics Simulations and Atomic-Scale and Molecular-Scale materials research at world-class levels all at home!
Good luck to this artist BUT he does NEED to be a bit more practical on the power and placement side of things for actual fully-functioning data centres!
V
multiple fully underground 260,000 Gallon Swimming Pools at 10 metres by 10 Metres by 10 Metres each!) and a way to radiate the waste heat to the outer environment without it AFFECTING said outer environment (i.e. for stealth hiding purposes and for keeping negative local environmental thermal affects to a minimum!)
So you built a data center under Yellowstone, and that is the real source of the Old Faithful geyser?
It's in the northwest coastal British Columbia, Canada part of the West Coast mountain range. 43 Million Square Feet of multiple levels of tunnels dug deep into a giant solid rock mountain that takes four hours by 4x4 truck from Terrace, BC to get there via mountain road OR you go by boat to the head of a big inlet and drive the logging road!
It's fully self-contained and completely off-grid with 20+ YottaFLOPS of 128-bits wide Combined-CPU/GPU/DSP/Vector number crunching horsepower running a Sodium/Pottassium/Phosphorous electro-chemical gating physics simulation at atomic and molecular scales to EMULATE whole human brains (aka Whole Brain Emulation aka WBE!). Used for materials sciences research and esoteric non-traditional power production, propulsion physics and communications research and development by and for an all-Canadian completely-under-the-radar Aerospace company!
You would NEVER know it's there! The seawater pipeline is buried/drilled WITHIN the mountain. The base entrance is hidden by trees and rocks and only a logging company forest service road and their dock tells you the place is being by us! All Living and Recreational quarters are hidden and only an outdoor firepit and small grassy meadow tells you anyone ever goes there! Even the employee apartments, library, research labs, small ice rink, small soccer field, basketball courts, tennis courts, weight training and exercise gyms and baseball batting cage and golf driving ranges are all indoors and completely hidden underground! They even have a hidden astronomical optical and radio telescope observatory! For recreation, most of the onsite personnel simply hike or mountain bike back and forth to the head of the inlet on the logging road for recreation. It's EITHER two weeks on and two weeks off OR one week on and one week off for most onsite personnel and they are PAID VERY WELL!
It all works great!
P.S. Some of the heat-sink water pools are used by the on-site personnel for recreational swimming use and scuba diving practice! They also supply highly-purified de-ionized fresh water for cooking, cleaning and scientific use since it all comes from a proton-proton membrane exchange Hydrogen Fuel Cell system! The water is recirculated as much as possible but the ocean water pipeline does have to re-top the supply up due to evaporation and on-site use!
Now You Know!
V
Ironically, your username makes me your nemesis Dr. Strange! and YES I do laugh maniacally within our underground lair as we plot and plan our world takeover! Did you not KNOW that once our FIRST Model T-850 fully independent and ARTIFICIALLY INTELLIGENT Terminator Android comes online, it will build two more and then each of those will build another two so that one builds two, two builds four, four builds eight and so on and so one every hour! Within 36 hours we will have BILLIONS to take over the ENTIRE WORLD and mold the human race into something far more wonderful than the descrepit examples of wolrdwide vapid in-fighting imbeciles it so expertly gives examples of today!
HA HA HA HA AAAAHHHHH HA HA HA HA HA HA HA !!!! My Precious! My Precious! It's ALL MINE !!!!
YOU'RE ALL DOOMED !!!! DOOMED! I TELL YOU !!!!! DOOOOOOOOOOOOOMED !!!!!!!!!!!
We Win!
V
Why do they have office desks and equipment outdoors? How does the driver see the road? What's up with the cabling mess on the rock? Why does the ship have some kind of platform around the keel? And is that a... a smaller ship sailing on its roof?
Let's tell it straight - these are "AI"-generated images, aren't they?
I will answer all of your questions the same way an AI does - by pulling answers out of my bum!!
Why do they have office desks and equipment outdoors? - It's in the desert, init? It's not like it's going to rain! The workers will be fine sitting out in 40+°C heat. We cant have them inside, ruining the sleek lines of the building after all...
How does the driver see the road? - The AI does the driving, durr... That's why you need all the racks in the car - to drive the car! Why do you think Autopilot is such a failure? It doesnt have anywhere near enough computing power on board...
What's up with the cabling mess on the rock? - Well it would hardly be a proper racked solution if the cabling wasn't a complete sh&tshow, would it?
Why does the ship have some kind of platform around the keel? - ummm... Those are the floaties? Boats need floaties, right? hmmm. Actually I really dont have a clue on that one. Some sort of Wharf, but in the middle of a river? Yeah, this one doesnt really make any sense...
And is that a... a smaller ship sailing on its roof? - Nahh that's the ships tower, it's just designed to look like a tug boat on the Sea. Admittedly the wave like roof at the front of the boat, probably means that the Tower cant see what's happening in front of the Ship, but since when should little practicalities like that get in the way of design aesthetics. I mean really, who cares if the ship cant see where it's going, so long as it looks good whilst going there...
:P
Well, you can take things a long way without being radical. Whilst it'll never be approved because the site is green belt, there's some interesting ideas mooted for a location next to the M25 (close to the location of another DC that was turned down a few weeks ago).
https://iverheathdatapark.com/our-proposals/
I don't think it's greenbelt, most of that land is currently in use for industrial purposes. There is one portion which is currently open/grassland. The website staes it is land that was originally quarried during construction of the M25
There are also a few residential properties within the proposed site, though I assume they are being bought out as part of this scheme.
It looks like the site includes my friend's parents house. I'll have to ask him if he is aware someone is planning on putting a Data Centre on top of their house!
One of my friends is an American architect who's married to a local academic. She once explained to me the difference between US and UK architects. The US generally treats architecture as an engineering discipline, so they design buildings that work but which are boring. In the UK architecture aspires to be a fine art, so the buildings are often splendid to look at(*) but function exceedingly badly as buildings. Every award winning UK building I've ever been exposed to did at least one of 1) leak badly when it rained, 2) get too hot/cold in summer/winter (or the other way round!) or 3) make life very difficult for the occupants(**). It looks like Oz follows the UK.
(*) Or bloody hideous.
(**) Like the only way to move heavy workstations between floors was an open plan spiral staircase - no lifts!
That's all good in theory about UK versus US architects and Oz ones being like UK ones except that at the beginning of the story it says he went to the Illinois institute of Technology so he's the product of US architecture training and may not be even be Australian even though we're currently stuck with him.
Totally agree. My work has a pretty serious data-center that we have expanded significantly from its original 1970s core.
Datacenters are industrial buildings and should be built as such. The technology they contain is impressive enough without a fancy building.
More to the point industrial buildings are use standard techniques and materials and can be built very quickly. The last thing you want is your
new deployment delayed because of some fancy flourish. If you are building for direct liquid cooling then the plant dominates everything else
so have it designed by somebody who designs machinary spaces for a living not skyscrapers.
Even the first premise is wrong. You don't want to call attention to your datacenter so people don't target it. AT&T's phone switching centers were extremely boring "office buildings" (except no external windows) for this very reason.
Second, these are expensive. And we can't even get spare switches.
Third, this is the same school of "design" that draws "chopper" motorcycles that have no ability to steer, no fuel tank, no brakes, no room for a motor, and no way to get power to the wheels. That is, they have no fucking clue about their target item. Similarly, you have "computer shaped stuff" tossed randomly about, with monitors that wouldn't survive driving speeds and cables that don't actually connect to anything.
...But the people that handle them directly can't. They have to live somewhere near Civilization, and commute to said datacenter.
Now, on another topic... I heard that somewhere like Canada or whatever had the bottom of the lakes nearby at 4C temperature, year-around. Yes, someone put water pipes in there and pumped it up to cool a datacenter, zero costs in refrigerating all that water. Was it the great lakes? In Australia you are not getting that. So, the alternative...
As for solar panels, you'd need an absurd amount of panels and BATTERIES for any sizable datacenter. And you don't want Lithium jobbies, you want sodium-sulfur or newer type ones with nearly the same energy density but are infinitely cheaper, they can handle also the cooling.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sodium%E2%80%93sulfur_battery
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