[Infowarrior] - Google's "sea barge" data centers?

[Richard Forno]

September 15, 2008
Google search finds seafaring solution
Murad Ahmed, Technology Reporter

http://technology.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/tech_and_web/the_web/article4753389.ece

Google may take its battle for global domination to the high seas with  
the launch of its own “computer navy”.

The company is considering deploying the supercomputers necessary to  
operate its internet search engines on barges anchored up to seven  
miles (11km) offshore.

The “water-based data centres” would use wave energy to power and cool  
their computers, reducing Google’s costs. Their offshore status would  
also mean the company would no longer have to pay property taxes on  
its data centres, which are sited across the world, including in  
Britain.

In the patent application seen by The Times, Google writes: “Computing  
centres are located on a ship or ships, anchored in a water body from  
which energy from natural motion of the water may be captured, and  
turned into electricity and/or pumping power for cooling pumps to  
carry heat away.”

The increasing number of data centres necessary to cope with the  
massive information flows generated on popular websites has prompted  
companies to look at radical ideas to reduce their running costs.

The supercomputers housed in the data centres, which can be the size  
of football pitches, use massive amounts of electricity to ensure they  
do not overheat. As a result the internet is not very green.

Data centres consumed 1 per cent of the world’s electricity in 2005.  
By 2020 the carbon footprint of the computers that run the internet  
will be larger than that of air travel, a recent study by McKinsey, a  
consultancy firm, and the Uptime Institute, a think tank, predicted.

In an attempt to address the problem, Microsoft has investigated  
building a data centre in the cold climes of Siberia, while in Japan  
the technology firm Sun Microsystems plans to send its computers down  
an abandoned coal mine, using water from the ground as a coolant. Sun  
said it could save $9 million (£5 million) of electricity costs a year  
and use half the power the data centre would have required if it was  
at ground level.

Technology experts said Google’s “computer navy” was an unexpected but  
clever solution. Rich Miller, the author of the  
datacentreknowledge.com blog, said: “It’s really innovative, outside- 
the-box thinking.”

Google refused to say how soon its barges could set sail. The company  
said: “We file patent applications on a variety of ideas. Some of  
those ideas later mature into real products, services or  
infrastructure, some don’t.”

Concerns have been raised about whether the barges could withstand an  
event such as a hurricane. Mr Miller said: “The huge question raised  
by this proposal is how to keep the barges safe.”