Today it will 'feel like' 107 degrees in the armpit of New Jersey. You don't know what you've got until it's gone. The backyard swimming pool my parents thoughtfully incorporated into our bucolic suburban domicile is a distant memory.
But Microsoft knows what's up, they put one of its servers underwater in an effort to cool the thing better. No you're not normally supposed to put your computers underwater. Thing is, one of the primary limits to the power of what a computer can do is heat. Computers don't sweat like we do, so we don't notice it, but they work really hard to do all that binary computation. [Today is Leibniz bday, thanks Google Doodle, he refined the binary number system, among many other things integral to our modern world.]
So if we could only figure out a way to keep computers cool. Air conditioning is very expensive, and lemonade doesn't really work (does that really work?). In fact, Microsoft is trying this as a part of their sustainability effort. I know you've recently heard how much energy is used to mine cryptocurrencies - it's more than the energy expenditure of some nations. So if we can figure out a way to cool these things down, that would help a lot.
Now to the main point: We will not stop by putting computers underwater, because there is a place much colder than that, and we've been going there a lot more than usual as of late. Yes, outerspace is the next frontier for high-efficiency computing.
SpaceX, seen above, is well on its way to giving us a cozy place in low earth orbit that we can call home to our global digital infrastructure. Seems to make more sense than dunking your mainframe in a bathtub. And now, if you will for a moment imagine our human future, as we leave the meat behind, to exist entirely in the digitally-mediated reality of a constellation of hundreds of thousands of computer satellites blinking in low earth orbit.
Notes:
image source: Space Jellyfish from SpaceX launch
Microsoft sinks data centre off Orkne
Jun 2018, BBC
No comments:
Post a Comment