Inside the Arctic Circle, Where Your Facebook Data Live

http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2013-10-03/facebooks-new-data-center-in-sweden-puts-the-heat-on-hardware-makers

by aelaguiz • 13 years ago

44 41 13 years ago

businessweek.com

sidcool• 13 years ago

Arctic circle. OK. Cool.

bestest• 13 years ago

nope. apparently it's article circle. (seriously though, how the hell does one mistype it like this!)

DanBC3• 13 years ago

Facebook’s data center (bottom) spends nearly two-thirds less energy on power and cooling than a typical facility. The building’s upper level (top) pumps in frigid air, cooling the servers below, then vents warmer air outside

Pumping warm air outside feels really wasteful.

Is there any work on increasing efficiencies with waste heat?

fennecfoxen• 13 years ago

No? It would be inefficient to put a lot of effort and capital into trying to extract useful work from a marginally-above-room-temperature exhaust stream. Something about thermodynamics and low efficiencies at small temperature gradients :P

DanBC3• 13 years ago

Geothermal heat pumps make use of marginal differences in temperature to provide useful heating and cooling.

If you have room temperature exhaust air that's useful for at least keeping rooms at room temperature. But at the moment it's just being vented.

danpat• 13 years ago

You're not thinking like someone that lives in a cold place :-P

In cold climates, the heat could be distributed to reduce the heating load in other buildings during cold months.

Where I live (Alberta, Canada), it's continuously below freezing for at least 3 months, and often below for 2-3 months either side of that. People would be all over getting free heat from a neighbour, even if it was just a little bit.

icegreentea• 13 years ago

The difficulty is that data centers don't generate "high grade heat" ie, they don't actually run very hot. While it might dissipate a lot of heat, the temperature is quite low (they claim their data center only run at ~30C). As a result, their 'waste' heat stream will never be above ~30C if they don't have anything special going on. There aren't a lot of useful things you can do with that type of heat. Even if they managed to dump it all into water and them pipe it over to surrounding housing, it's still not -that- useful, and likely not worth the cost/energy of setting up the system.

While they could also conceivably run liquid cooling to -all- of their high temperature components (CPUs and PSUs probably) to get a higher grade waste heat stream, once again, its likely not worth the energy/money to set up that system.

This is why most cogeneration or waste heat schemes are on industrial processes - their "waste" heat is pumping out at above boiling at a minimum, and far more useful.

mikeash2• 13 years ago

Just to elaborate, this "low grade heat" makes it physically impossible to recover much energy out of it.

If the ambient air is, say, 0C (273K), and the exhaust air is 30C (303K), then the optimal efficiency for recovering energy from the exhaust is less than 10%.

In other words, if your data center uses 1MW of power, then with perfect recovery equipment, you could generate 100kW off the waste heat, reducing your total power consumption to 0.9MW. Not a particularly big win, especially since your recovery equipment is not going to be 100% efficient.

runamok2• 13 years ago

I'd imagine all the waste heat that air conditioners generate to cool a traditional data center is significantly larger.

DanBC3• 13 years ago

I agree. Is there any work on capturing and using that heat?

code_duck2• 13 years ago

As evidenced by the claimed electrical efficiency, it's a lot less wasteful than bringing in hot outside air and air conditioning it.

mathattack• 13 years ago

I assume the title will get fixed. I think the interesting thing is it's located in Sweden due to power reasons.

bonchibuji• 13 years ago

Google built one in Finland a couple of years back. They are using the sea water for cooling.

http://www.google.com/about/datacenters/inside/locations/ham...

randomdestructn• 13 years ago

with fewer components they can function at temperatures as high as 85F. (Most servers are expected to keel over at 75F.)

I'm no datacentre guy, so can someone clarify if this is a typo? What kind of electronics start failing just above room temperature?

I'd think HDDs would be the most sensitive, but google said failures aren't well correlated to hdd temp (http://research.google.com/archive/disk_failures.pdf‎)

leeoniya• 13 years ago

85F ambient maybe?, the components are necessarily much hotter then.

meanwhile: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JtDuqqR_Dbg and http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6IX9U2zaI_I

6cxs2hd6• 13 years ago

I think they meant C not F.

coherentpony4• 13 years ago

Are you sure they don't actually mean celsius, rather than fahrenheit?

bronson• 13 years ago

Yep. 85degC is super hot, and junction temp is usually a few tens of degrees hotter than the ambient temp. Even if the packaging and interconnects can handle it, the dies themselves will fail early due to metal migration.

Of course, if the average working life of a Google server is measured in months, then maybe that's no big deal.

ghshephard• 13 years ago

This was a popular attitudes in the 80s, and 90s, until Google, Intel and others did some research and discovered that Cold data centers aren't the be-all/end-all.

After reading the research I kept on the order of 100 servers in a server room at approx. 80 degrees for a couple years, and didn't see any devices fail.

I don't think anyone in the last 10+ years has believe that "servers are expected to keel over at 75F"

paulbennett• 13 years ago

Does pumping out heat in a cold area like this have any meaningful effect on local climate or environment?

coldcode• 13 years ago

Polar bears work cheap.

coherentpony4• 13 years ago

I don't understand what the Arctic circle has to do with this. It's a data centre, not an HPC cluster. Data centres don't run nearly as hot as clusters.

dorfsmay2• 13 years ago

All data centres have cooling. They get cooling for free 7 months of the year!

coherentpony4• 13 years ago

So it really is about the cooling. Ok, thanks.

miahi• 13 years ago

I saw a small data center (4 racks) get from 18C to 55C in one hour when the chillers failed. And that was the air temperature, not the server temperature. In theory you can just open the doors, but then you cannot control the humidity.

rypskar2• 13 years ago

I do also have a problem understanding what the Arctic Circle has to do with this. North of arctic circle in America and Scandinavia is two totally different things

klausjensen• 13 years ago

Ok, I'll bite. What do you mean?

ztnewman• 13 years ago

Did you read the article? Have you ever been in a data center?

spongle• 13 years ago

Probably no privacy laws there ;)

coherentpony4• 13 years ago

Did you mean 'ample' rather than 'no'?

'No' privacy laws => surveillance.

freehunter• 13 years ago

I think he meant Facebook's privacy policy, not NSA spying.

dynofuz• 13 years ago

Great! Just what we need to accelerate the melting of the ice caps.

brryant• 13 years ago

There are so many typos in this article that it reads like a FB post

hablahaha• 13 years ago

So I get that it might be grammatically correct to use 'Data Live', but it sounds quite strange to me, I've never actually run across this before.

Inside the Arctic Circle, Where Your Facebook Data Live

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