OCEANS OF DATA TECHNOLOGY'S NATURAL BID FOR SURVIVAL

摘要

host electronics suffer a debilitating aquaphobia. At the littlest spillage-heaven forbid Dorothy's bucket-of water, our wicked widgets shriek and melt.Microsoft, it would seem, missed the memo. Last June, the company installed a smallish data center on a patch of seabedjust off the coast of Scotland's Orkney Islands; around it, approximately 933,333 bucket-fuls of brine circulate every hour. As David Wolpert, who studies the thermodynamics of computing systems, wrote in a recent blog post for Scientific American, "Many people have impugned the rationality."The idea to submerge 864 servers in saltwater was, in fact,quite rational, the result of a five-year research project led by future-proofing engineers. Errant liquid might fritz your phone, but the slyer, far deadlier killer of technology is the opposing elemental force, fire. Nearly every system failure in the history of computers has been caused by overheating. As diodes and transistors work harder and get hotter, their susceptibility to degradation intensifies exponentially. Localized, it's the warm iPhone on your cheek or a wheezing laptop giving you upper-leg sweats. At scale, it's Outlook rendered inoperable by remote server meltdown for 16 excruciating hours-which happened in 2013.