China begins building underwater data center with performance equal to 6 million PCs — aims to save 122 million KWh of electricity and nearly ten soccer fields of land | Data centers find refuge at...

L4sBot@lemmy.worldmod to Technology@lemmy.world – 189 points – China begins building underwater data center with performance equal to 6 million PCs — aims to save 122 million KWh of electricity and nearly ten soccer fields of land
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China begins building underwater data center with performance equal to 6 million PCs — aims to save 122 million KWh of electricity and nearly ten soccer fields of land | Data centers find refuge at...::China Central Television reports that China has added another data module to the country's commercial underwater data center (UDC) off Hainan Island.

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Great. Now we're just apparently directly warming the oceans instead of indirectly.

It will take more streaming porn to boil the ocean than even you could watch.

From one Datacenter? Yes. If you put all datacenters into the sea? Definitely not. And if the Bitcoin scumbags decide that this is a good idea and built huge mining farms underwarer it's even worse. Datacenters are one of the biggest contributors to energy need already, taking up 1-1.3% of global energy demand. That's no joke

Going off google the energy required to heat the oceans by 1 degree is approximately 5.4*10^21 kj, or 1389 trillion GWh, or the energy output of over 170 million nuclear power plants over an entire year. Safe to say putting all the server farms in the world in there still isn't going to make a dent.

It might affect local temperature by a relevant amount if there's too many in one spot perhaps, and that could be pretty bad. But generally, saving energy is a good thing.

The temperature of the ocean may not change but the heat is dissipated into the atmosphere, making extreme weather events more likely.

Bro I got some bad news for you about how ships, submaines, and costal power plants cool themselves.

On site access would be so expensive

oops we forgot to plug in a cable better hop in the submersible to keep up them 9's babyyy

That's a cool idea. The bottom of the ocean is a pretty hostile environment though, it better be very well engineered to have any sort of longevity.

It's 35m deep - for comparison recreational scuba divers go up to 30m deep and professional scuba divers up to 60m deep.

It will have to be well engineered and difficult to repair compared to a land facility, but nothing compared to like the space station.

Very cool idea, after 25 years there should be significant cost savings overall.

except that they can't just repair or replace any hardware. and even if nothing breaks, in 25 years the hardware will be incredibly obsolete. have you tried using a 25 year old computer to do something as basic as browsing the web?

The space station only has to withstand 1atm of pressure and isn't subjected to anywhere near as much risk of corrosion.

I wonder what distro they run 🤔

Ultramarine Linux of course!

How would it compare to Mint for a beginner user doing mostly web based work and gaming?

I was mostly joking as I've never used that distro. I've used Linux Mint and it's pretty much suited for everything you'd need.

Try it. You're asking for something subjective and dependent on hardware and use case.

For example I had a ton of trouble with mint. I tried Ubuntu and it was okay. I then tried popos and have been running it for over 3 years now and I've had maybe one large hiccup but nothing but a stable system.

Thanks for the feedback, I'll just have to try it out :)

You're welcome, have fun :). You can also setup virtual machines to see if you like the look and feel before actually installing it on your system.

This way you'll be able to try a handful of distros at a time, just a bit of a speed run so you can get to the one you want faster.