Comments: 132 +- Developers: Google's Chiller-Less Data Center on Wednesday July 15, @06:37PM
Posted
by
samzenpus
on Wednesday July 15, @06:37PM
from the cooler-than-cool dept.
from the cooler-than-cool dept.
1sockchuck writes "Google has begun operating a data center in Belgium that has no chillers to support its cooling systems, which will improve energy efficiency but make weather forecasting a larger factor in its network management. With power use climbing, many data centers are using free cooling to reduce their reliance on power-hungry chillers. By foregoing chillers entirely, Google will need to reroute workloads if the weather in Belgium gets too warm. The facility also has its own water treatment plant so it doesn't need to use potable water from a local utility."
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What's next? (Score:5, Funny)
Soon they will generate all their own power from wind and solar, convert all their employees shit to power so they don't need the sewerage system either, send all their traffic through the network of low earth orbit satellites they are about to launch which also conveniently beam solar power back down to them.
So basically at the end of the day they will be able to buy or swindle a plot of land from some country with low tax, bring in all their own employees, contribute absolutely nothing to the local economy and leave when the sun goes down. It's great really, saves them on lawyers that would otherwise help them pussyfoot through the swaths of modern over-regulation and the satellites will help them get past any censorship / connectivity problems.
And if China start shooting down their satellites, Google will make satellites that shoot back
Re:What's next? (Score:5, Funny)
I am totally buying Google stock if they do this.
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Unreliable... (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Unreliable... (Score:5, Interesting)
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Re:Unreliable...Probably not (Score:5, Insightful)
I think the concept is interesting, and it makes me wonder if we'll see more datacenters built in areas of the world more conducive to projects like this in the future.
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Re:Unreliable...Probably not (Score:5, Interesting)
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Re: (Score:3, Funny)
So basically everything gets rerouted on a hot day.
Exactly, and you can stop googling, get out of the basement and go to the beach. How bad is that ?
Re:Unreliable... (Score:5, Informative)
I just designed a data center for a large Big Ten univeristy and there were no large air handlers involved at all. The system had two 400-ton chillers with the chilled water piped directly to rack mount APC fan coils. Without "green" being the basis of design, the chiller system still operates right at about 1kW/ton.
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Re:Unreliable... (Score:4, Interesting)
I am kind of confused about how many kW of power it takes to transfer heat. Heat moves from high to low, you have to pump cold water through a coil and force warm air across that coil. The amount of heat transferred is a function of the face velocity and temperature of the air across that coil, the amount of fluid moved and temperature through the coil and the characteristics (fin spacing, fin size, material) of the coil.
The temperature of the computers isn't really the important factor, it is the heat rejected. Again using rules of thumb, you can assume that 80% of the electrical power delivered to the computers will be dissipated as heat. The total of that heat rejected along with the other heat inputs to the space, e.g. lighting, walls, roof, window loads, etc., will determine your cooling load. Almost all of this load is sensible, meaning heat only, for other occupancy types you would also have to consider latent (moisture) loads as far as people and ventilation air in determining the amount of cooling needed.
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Re:Unreliable... (Score:4, Informative)
? 100% of the electrical power delivered to the computer is dissipated as heat. It's the law. It will be far less than the nameplate power (that electrical uses), and perhaps 80% of what is delivered to the building (after transformer, UPS, and PDUs), but it all ends up as heat (unless you're splitting hairs about the acoustical energy emissions and velocity pressure in the exhaust, which is small and quickly converted to heat).
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Re:Unreliable... (Score:5, Interesting)
The 81F water can be produced directly from open cooling towers (direct evaporation) whenever the wetbulb is lower than 76F (4 degree approach plus a 1F on your flat plate that isolates the datacenter loop from the open tower loop).
You designed an efficient datacenter, but you're five years behind cutting edge (not actually a bad thing for most critical environment clients). The next wave of datacenters will have PUEs of 1.2 or less and redefine the space from a noisy but cool space to hang out to a hot machine room with industrial heat exhaust design.
I actually just finished a chiller less 8MW schematic design and analysis for a bid. It was my second this month (the first was a cake walk - an extreme Twb of 67F, the second was west coast light conditions).
PS: Secondary pumps? Seriously? Unless you have to boost up to 25 psi to feed a Cray or some other HPC I thought everyone who cared had moved onto variable primary-only pumping. (Sorry, feeling a bit snarky after hitting a 40 hour week on Weds...)
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Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Primary loop is feeding the chiller. Most chillers don't like variable flow. The secondary loop is feeding the load.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Servers may be able to operate at 90-100, but they simply won't last as long being cooked compared to equipment that lives at cooler temperatures. This probably doesn't matter if you're Google and don't care about burning hardware or if you have money to spare and are always installing new equipment, or would rather generate truckloads of electronics waste replacing servers faster than a cooler facility just to get a PUE to brag about. The rest of us will have to settle for server rooms with air conditionin
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Operating 500 hours a year at 90F (the peak of the allowable range) is unlikely to impact longevity. 100F is outside of the allowable range. Your opinion is contradicted by what IBM, Intel, Dell, Sun, and numerous datacenter owners along with the design professionals at ASHRAE have developed over the course of several years of research and many (mostly dull)
Re:Unreliable... (Score:5, Informative)
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Worth the tradeoff? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Worth the tradeoff? (Score:4, Insightful)
If you're Google? Apparently the answer is "yes."
More people can and should do this. 27C is plenty cool enough for servers. It annoys me to go into a nipple crinkling datacenter knowing they're burning more juice cooling the darned thing than they are crunching the numbers. A simple exhaust fan and some air filters would be fine almost all of the time, and would be less prone to failure.
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Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
It's probably not as much about the energy bill as it is about the PR.
If it wasn't PR, they'd have chillers 'just in case', even if turned off most of the time. As it stands, they may be subject to a large risk of month-long heat waves killing them on paying idle employees, taxes, and taking a hit on capital depreciation costs for zero productive output that they are presumably banking on by bothering to build another datacenter.
Of course, there may be something unique about the site/strategy that makes th
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Yes , but not because of the bill itself.
Google has been actively developing a reputation in the corporate world for squeezing the most CPU-bang out of a buck, and a great way to do that is by cutting down on the amount of power a CPU uses.
A few weeks back there was an article on Slashdot which discussed a before-unseen Google innovation concerning its servers - a 12 volt battery that cut the need for an APC (which lowered costs by lowering both the power flowing to the CPU and the power required to cool th
Reroute the weather instead (Score:5, Funny)
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Investing (Score:3, Funny)
I think Google needs to start investing some time and money into buying or building Nuclear Power Facilities.
It could pay off for them, because they certainly don't need all of the power they would generate, and could sell some back to the Country/State/Region they build it in.
Sounds like a win-win to me.
P.S. - Please don't start a flame war about how Nuclear Power is 'unclean' or 'dangerous' -- in today's society it is cleaner, more efficient and just as safe, if not safer, than coal-fired generators.
Great Opportunity for New Zealand (Score:2)
This might be a dumb question (Score:3, Interesting)
But if your data center is in say, Minnesota, it seems like you could balance the temperature with outside air for many months out of the year. Obviously you'd need to light up the chillers in the summer, but running them 4 months out of the year seems like a huge energy savings than running them year round.
I remember visting Superior in the summer and the lake water was freezing f'ing cold even in June. Wonder if you could run a closed loop heat exchanger without screwing up the lake environment?
Re:This might be a dumb question (Score:4, Informative)
I don't know about natural lakes but man made ponds have been used for just that purpose.
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Re:This might be a dumb question (Score:4, Interesting)
I don't know about natural lakes but man made ponds have been used for just that purpose.
Man made ponds are used because the EPA crawls up your ass if you want to use a natural body of water for any commercial/industrial output.
Note: I'm saying that's a bad thing. I'm glad the "good old days," when chemicals, raw sewage, and cooling water were dumped willy nilly into the waterways and drinking supply, are gone. You warm up an area of water 10 or 15 degrees farenheit and you'll kill most everything living in it but algae.
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Re:This might be a dumb question (Score:4, Informative)
Cornell University actually did this exact thing to cool a good chunk of the campus. It's called lake source cooling [cornell.edu]. While there will of course be some environmental impact, the energy usage is 20% of normal chillers and thus is, I'm sure, an environmental net gain.
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Re:This might be a dumb question (Score:4, Informative)
They do! Well... not Superior, but Lake Ontario.
Toronto has a rather large system that uses deep, cool water as a heat sink.
Enwave [wikipedia.org] is the company that provides this service.
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Re:This might be a dumb question (Score:5, Informative)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_lake_water_cooling [wikipedia.org]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geothermal_heating [wikipedia.org]
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Re:This might be a dumb question (Score:5, Interesting)
The short answer is yes --- water takes a staggering amount of energy to change temperature (it's one of the many properties the stuff's got that's really weird). A big lake makes an ideal dumping ground for waste heat. What's more, the environmental impact is going to be minimal: even the biggest data centre isn't going to produce enough waste energy to have much effect.
(A big data center consumes about 5MW of power. The specific heat capacity of water is about 4kJ/kg.K, which means that it takes 4kJ to raise the temperature on one kilogram of water by one kelvin. Assuming all that gets dumped into the lake as heat, that means you're raising the temperature of about 1000 litres per second by one kelvin. A small lake, say 1km x 1km x 10m, contains 10000000000 litres! So you're going to need to run your data centre for ten million seconds, or about 110 days, to raise the temperature by one measly degree. And that's ignoring the cooling off the surface, which would vastly overpower any amount of heat you could put into it.)
(The same applies in reverse. You can extract practically unlimited amounts of heat from water. Got running water in your property? Go look into heat pumps.)
In fact, if you were dumping waste heat into a lake, it would make sense to try and concentrate the heat to produce hotspots. You would then use this for things like fish farming. Warm water's always useful.
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Re:This might be a dumb question (Score:4, Interesting)
At those latitudes the ambient subterranean temperature remains pretty ambient all year long. Drill into the side of a mountain or hill with a boring tool, leave the edges rough (with a smooth poured/paved floor for access) and just drop your server containers in there with power coming in. If you go all the way through the hill you can use the natural air currents to push/pull air through the tunnels, and the natural heat absorption qualities of stone will keep the temperature down. I'd be surprised if any active "cooling" were needed at all.
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Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
I blame that bastard Carnot personally for this... They could get additional work out of that hot water, but it gets prohibitively expensive the lower your delta T between hot and cold gets. I was all stoked about finding some sort of stirling heat engine to run off some datacenter waste heat, until I worked the numbers and found the annual average maximum therorectical efficiency was under 15%.
F*cking entropy.
Yakhchal (Score:5, Informative)
The ancient Persians had a passively cooled refrigerator called the yakhchal [wikipedia.org] which "often contained a system of windcatchers that could easily bring temperatures inside the space down to frigid levels in summer days."
Perhaps the Google datacenter could employ some variation of their technique.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
This reminds me of a technique for cooling water in a desert which could tenably be applied to the data center as well.
Basically, a container is filled with water, closed/sealed, and wrapped with a damp/wet towel and buried in the ground (or just placed somewhere in the sun, I suppose). The evaporation of the moisture in the rag will draw the heat from the inside of the container, resulting in frigid water.
Put a data center on a dry coastal equatorial area and harness solar to desalinate the water. Build th
Re:Yakhchal (Score:4, Interesting)
There is a way to make ice in a dry environment by exposing water to the coolness of the night sky and insulating it during the day.
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More interesting than we think... (Score:4, Interesting)
Good to see. (Score:3, Interesting)
Energy tradeoff of treating own water (Score:3, Interesting)
I'm not sure I understand why they constructed their own water treatment plant. I would think that it would be more energy efficient on the whole to use the already constructed municipal system in the area.
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Municipal water (at least here, in the US) means "chlorinated water". Chlorine does terrible things to pipes, coolers, pumps - everything. Having your own water treatment system means the chlorine never gets in, saving bundles in maintenance. To get an idea, find two similar water cooled vehicles - one which has had chlorinated water added to the radiator routinely, and another whose owner has been more choosy. Look down into those radiators. I've actually seen copper radiators corroded out in states t
Just being lobby-savvy... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
No. They will just sponsor Al Gore to speak about global warming at a local meeting. Thanks to the Gore Effect [news.com.au], the temperature usually drops dramatically as soon as Gore arrives.
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Guess they'll be in big trouble when global warming strikes Belgium!
Don't be silly. Everyone knows that Belgium doesn't really exist. [zapatopi.net]
Re:Global warming (Score:4, Interesting)
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Actually... (Score:3, Insightful)
I did read the PP and I've even replied to it.
And I thought that I was clear enough in my reply, but apparently not.
See... the game is not most power-efficient cooling, or even best cooling.
The game is "most bang per buck invested in the server infrastructure".
Now... Saving money by reducing the cooling costs by using huge passive cooling farms is a nice idea, but not as easily calculable as simply switching to cheaper electricity.
Sure, should you move your servers to Siberia you would get shitload of passi