Open source datacenters and open source thinking will undo self-inflicted DC damage

It's hard to make big sheds symbols of oppression, but the datacenter industry's having a jolly good crack at it. Its big boxes of semi-sentient sand are increasingly seen as satanic sandcastles, environmental disasters that inflict drought while boiling oceans. Their role as dark cathedrals of the equally demonic AIs has done …

[Doctor Syntax]

"operating on the edge of sanity"

On the edge? Rupert, you are a generous soul.

[cyberdemon]

satanic sandcastles

Thanks, i'm keeping that.. I wonder what William Blake or John Betjeman would think of modern-day Slough..

As for the wave power machine, I wouldn't trust anything that Peter Thiel is involved in!

My fag-packet calc says it's yet another dubious investment scheme. For it to produce useful power it would need to be enormous. From the pictures linked in the article I estimate the sphere at the top is 10 metres in diameter. So when fully submerged it displaces about 500 tonnes of water.

Supposing the waves are 2 metres high and arrive once every 10 seconds, that's 1MJ per wave, every 10 seconds i.e. 0.1 Megawatt per wave-buoy machine. So for a Gigawatt they'd need to build 10,000 of them, or build them much bigger.

[Anonymous Coward]

Talking About Honesty

Given what's happened to date, few thinking people will accept the bit-barns' self-reported energy-consumption numbers as truth. The same is true for bit-barn builders' estimates and projections.

Why? Because Big Money warps everything it touches.

[Doctor Syntax]

Re: Talking About Honesty

The would-be bit-barn owners get bit-barn builders' estimates so there must be an element of justice in that. (Sound of breath being sucked in through teeth and the rattle of a pencil as it drops from behind the ear.)

[retiredFool]

Crazy

Sorry the article just ignores reality. The way these things get built is not transparency, it is back room deals with hookers and blow, not to mention funding the right candidate for mayor. If open source has proven anything, it is that it fails miserably at the government level. Munich I think it was famously switched to open source from microsoft and suddenly pulled a u turn. This latest Euro craze of open source may be different, but I expect in the end it will be some Euro corporate packager of open source that gets a contract to put it into government offices. And only because the US has trump and has shown what an unreliable partner the us and its corp's are, so microsoft will be deemed a security threat (and rightly so, they are, even for the US).

[Bran Muffin]

I'd love it if...

They named this first unit Yamato.

[doublelayer]

An open source datacenter? A what now?

I think I agree with the author on all of the problems associated with datacenter builds today. I'm having much more difficulty with the suggestion of what we do about it. As far as I understand it, and I admit that's not very much, "open source" as used in the article means "honesty". If so, that's a bad phrase for it, because there is no good parallel between what open source enables users and developers to do and just not lying about how much power you're going to use or whether any of the generation plans on the website exist in any form other than the press release.

It also won't work. We know why there isn't honesty in datacenter builds today. It's not out of paranoia about trade secrets, the way that software was and still is in many areas. It's because, if they were honest, people would be as or more angry as they are now. Instead of telling a story about new nuclear designs, a datacenter could be honest: "natural gas generators are cheap and, if demand doesn't show up quickly enough, we don't end up with a massive investment rusting away, so we're going to build a bunch of those. Interesting floating ocean things cost a lot of money in R&D and connectivity, so we're going to ignore those.". Anyone who cares about pollution or power prices is not going to be mollified. Dishonesty often happens when the truth is not to the advantage of the speaker. That's the case this time.

[DS999]

The actual power consumption figures of the server racks don't even matter

That's something that can be assumed to be a constant whether you are putting them in a traditional datacenter or you are putting them in this floating contraption. The cost of those racks of GPUs/CPUs is also a constant.

So what matters is how much does it cost per gigawatt of wave power generation to build a fleet of these things, versus the cost to build a gigawatt of capacity on the ground - datacenter shell plus cooling, as well as on site power generation since that's increasingly required for projects to go anywhere. If the cost of these floating wave generator platforms per gigawatt is competitive with building it on the ground, then this is a great option. No neighbors to complain, no one to fight against it for contributing to global warming.

Heck put a bunch of them out in the great garbage patch and make a show of the ship that delivers them dragging a huge net full of plastic debris to be disposed of on the return trip. A drop in the bucket compared to the volume of waste that's out there, but it'd be good PR.

[Anonymous Coward]

radical openness?

That’s already happening. “Too bad, peasants, enjoy our new data center in your neighborhood”

[dsmithhfx]

The need for data centers has been amply demonstrated, and eclipsed by the need to not have data centers. Do keep up.