Microsoft declares its underwater data center test was a success

Underwater pods can reduce latency by moving cloud services closer to customers.

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[Jim Salter]

Disappointed that you didn't mention a "deep dive" into the topic anywhere in this piece.

I started to go off on a whole "surface" pun thread in the middle, but then decided that it was too confusing, and that I was no Beth Mole.

 

[Jim Salter]

you also gain security benefits (nobody around to try and break in)

That is not going to be a forever thing—and I, for one, was already excited for future movies featuring SCUBA-enabled underwater physical pentests while I was writing the article.

I mean. There could legitimately be GUARD SHARKS. With frickin' lasers! (Okay, maybe not so much the lasers. And dolphins would probably be a better choice, or maybe sealions. And... and... and I still wanna see that movie.)

 

[Jim Salter]

I wonder if being underwater would provide any protection from CMEs/geomagnetic storm type events?

Unless the hull of the pod was specifically designed to be EM resistant and the input power was filtered and isolated, there's a good chance that a large em pulse would take it out anyway.

The power would be the only issue. 120 feet of water is one hell of an EMF attenuator. It takes about 5cm of water to halve the intensity of gamma rays below 200 keV.

For reference, 120 feet of water is roughly equivalent to six to twelve feet of solid lead as a radiation shield...

 

[Jim Salter]

I wonder if being underwater would provide any protection from CMEs/geomagnetic storm type events?

Unless the hull of the pod was specifically designed to be EM resistant and the input power was filtered and isolated, there's a good chance that a large em pulse would take it out anyway.

The power would be the only issue. 120 feet of water is one hell of an EMF attenuator. It takes about 5cm of water to halve the intensity of gamma rays below 200 keV.

For reference, 120 feet of water is roughly equivalent to six to twelve feet of solid lead as a radiation shield...

Knowing almost nothing about EMF/EMPs, does the big power cable going to it (say, a hypothetical shore power cable to go with your hypothetical EMP) make any difference to that?

Not directly. The cable's under all that water also. Your real concern is whether the EMP causes enough of a surge in any above-ground portion of the grid to propagate down that shore power line, and whether or not you've got breakers sufficiently fast and capable to interrupt the surge before it hits the expensive stuff.

Along, of course, with whether or not you've got some other way of powering the goods once the power goes out. And/or whether the servers are able to power themselves back on if power is ever interrupted to the entire pod.

The Marine Energy Research Centre is specifically mucking about with tidal current and wave motion electrical generation, which would in theory remove that avenue for failure also. If you end up not needing shore power at all and the only thing tethering the pod to the surface is fiber, you'd no longer have a route for an EMP to screw up your pod at all. But that's an if.

 

[Jim Salter]

I wonder if being underwater would provide any protection from CMEs/geomagnetic storm type events?

Unless the hull of the pod was specifically designed to be EM resistant and the input power was filtered and isolated, there's a good chance that a large em pulse would take it out anyway.

Isn't a metal cylinder basically a Faraday Cage? Also, isn't 20+ feet of water an excellent shield from radiation of all types? I remember reading the submarines have special very low bandwidth, extremely low frequency radios, because that's all that they can get to really penetrate the ocean (they also, if I understand right have more normal radios, but I think have to basically surface or get to shallow depths of water, to use them).

Underwater RF comms are effectively nonexistent from a modern point of view. You have to specially deploy a REALLY FREAKING LONG cable antenna attached to a buoy that gets it within a few meters of the surface, after which you get potentially about enough bandwidth and throughput to receive data in Morse Code.

Theoretically, you could hit 300bps on VLF; to the best of my knowledge, actual comms are at only 50 baud—half the speed of acoustically coupled dial-up modems I used as a kid in the 70s and early 80s.

 

[Jim Salter]

I wonder if being underwater would provide any protection from CMEs/geomagnetic storm type events?

Unless the hull of the pod was specifically designed to be EM resistant and the input power was filtered and isolated, there's a good chance that a large em pulse would take it out anyway.

Isn't a metal cylinder basically a Faraday Cage? Also, isn't 20+ feet of water an excellent shield from radiation of all types? I remember reading the submarines have special very low bandwidth, extremely low frequency radios, because that's all that they can get to really penetrate the ocean (they also, if I understand right have more normal radios, but I think have to basically surface or get to shallow depths of water, to use them).

Underwater RF comms are effectively nonexistent from a modern point of view. You have to specially deploy a REALLY FREAKING LONG cable antenna attached to a buoy that gets it within a few meters of the surface, after which you get potentially about enough bandwidth and throughput to receive data in Morse Code.

Theoretically, you could hit 300bps on VLF; to the best of my knowledge, actual comms are at only 50 baud—half the speed of acoustically coupled dial-up modems I used as a kid in the 70s and early 80s.

I think you're talking about ELF, not VLF.

No, that's standard VLF. ELF is way, way, WAY worse; it requires Shannon-Reed error correction and results in something like 5 bits per second effective throughput, and needs, IIRC, literal miles of shore-based antenna array for transmission.

 

[Jim Salter]

you also gain security benefits (nobody around to try and break in)

That is not going to be a forever thing—and I, for one, was already excited for future movies featuring SCUBA-enabled underwater physical pentests while I was writing the article.

I mean. There could legitimately be GUARD SHARKS. With frickin' lasers! (Okay, maybe not so much the lasers. And dolphins would probably be a better choice, or maybe sealions. And... and... and I still wanna see that movie.)

If the data center is completely sealed (aside from the fiber/power line) then all you need is atmospheric and tamper sensors to have the data center simply shut down if anyone is trying to mess with it summon the laser sharks. This can be both a safety and security measure.

Friend, your logic is good but your action scenes need more pizazz.

 

[Jim Salter]

You mean to tell me not one of these servers displayed "Press F1 to continue?"

"Bang 'shave and a haircut' on the pod wall to continue."

 

[Jim Salter]

Amongst it all latency pops up and the wo to go scenario is used which makes it interesting.

What in the world makes you think that a DC just slightly offshore increases latency in any meaningful way?

Microsoft's point is that it reduces latency, since you can get closer to most major population centers by going a little off shore than you would putting them where the land is cheap.

 

[Jim Salter]

I wonder if being underwater would provide any protection from CMEs/geomagnetic storm type events?

Unless the hull of the pod was specifically designed to be EM resistant and the input power was filtered and isolated, there's a good chance that a large em pulse would take it out anyway.

The power would be the only issue. 120 feet of water is one hell of an EMF attenuator. It takes about 5cm of water to halve the intensity of gamma rays below 200 keV.

For reference, 120 feet of water is roughly equivalent to six to twelve feet of solid lead as a radiation shield...

Jim,

You've had the misfortune to make a statement on a topic I'm giving a lecture on tomorrow. Prepare to be...commented...

Your figure--5 cm of water halving the intensity of gamma rays/x-rays below 200 keV is assuming that the x-rays are interacting via the Compton effect.

For a nice oversimplified picture, in this case, the photons have a short enough wavelength that they interact with individual electrons in a pretty particle-like manner. Their attenuation is really just driven by the sheer amount of stuff.

EMP pulses, based off of my fuzzy memory and backed up with a quick Google search, have lots of lower-frequency (longer wavelength) components. I'd be fearful of using Compton effect HVLs on them; RF energies act much more like waves and interact differently.

5cm is an example, though. There's one hell of a fudge factor at play, here, and I am politely interested in your very specific scenario that involves damaging levels of RF energy penetrating 120 feet of seawater. Be certain to double-check your work.

 

[Jim Salter]

you also gain security benefits (nobody around to try and break in)

That is not going to be a forever thing—and I, for one, was already excited for future movies featuring SCUBA-enabled underwater physical pentests while I was writing the article.

I mean. There could legitimately be GUARD SHARKS. With frickin' lasers! (Okay, maybe not so much the lasers. And dolphins would probably be a better choice, or maybe sealions. And... and... and I still wanna see that movie.)

Given the history of both the US and Russia tapping underwater cables, I'd say the USS Jimmy Carter can expect a new addition to the MMP and a new body courtesy of the NSA's Tailored Access Operations unit in the near future.

It's a lot easier to sneak into these servers through their data connections than to need physical access.

Everything interesting in the history of espionage comes down to "this used to be hard, but now this hard thing is easier than the thing which has been the easy thing, but nobody else noticed yet. YOINK!"

If physical security on this type of deployment gets ignored "because it's all underwater anyway", Interesting Things Will Happen. Even if it's just harvesting a pod to scavenge the metals out of it, meth-head air conditioner/catalytic converter style.

 

[Jim Salter]

I’m actually surprised the cooling is so seemingly easy.

Judging from the pictures the racks have pretty standard fans* moving the heat to a relatively small** volume of air, with the steel acting as a heatsink.
I can’t find figures on the temperature where the thing was placed, but a bit of searching tells me ocean floor temperatures are relatively stable around 0-3C (maybe slightly warmer in the presumably shallow area).

It uses 240kW of power, presumably the vast majority of that ends up as heat (there’s some light going in and out, not sure if that has any meaningful impact on heat).

I am not good at physics, but my initial thought was that the heat couldn’t transfer fast enough from the air to the steel - I imagined heat pipes connected to the hull, but obviously it works.
How would you go about estimating the heat that it can get rid of?

*

Spoiler

**

Spoiler

We haven't seen enough of this thing to know for certain that the heat dissipation is absolutely, 100%, totally passive. There might be a radiator with a low-flow pump moving cold seawater through it; you can dump IMMENSE amounts of heat that way.

There might also be a heat exchanger pumping fresh water (or mineral oil, or whatever) from heat sinks directly in the rack in a closed loop, with a passive radiator on the seawater side. AFAIK, Microsoft hasn't released full details about exactly how the cooling works, other than it's effectively free as compared to traditional refrigerative cooling.