Project Natick is an experimental data center undergoing research and development by Microsoft. Microsoft deployed its first undersea data center prototype in August 2015. [1] It has subsequently deployed and retrieved a "shipping-container" sized data center off the coast of the Northern Isles. [2] [3] Microsoft subcontracted Naval Group to spearhead the design and manufacture of the vessel. [4]
In 2013, a Microsoft employee with previous experience in the US Navy suggested that an underwater farm server could cut on cooling costs and increase environmental sustainability. [5] A white paper written by employees began to circulate to promote the idea.
In late 2014, the project was launched with a meeting in Redmond, Washington. [6] The first prototype was named Leona Philpot (named after a character from the Xbox Halo video game series) and was deployed off the coast of California on August 10, 2015. [7] The prototype was placed 30 feet underwater. The trial lasted 105 days and the prototype was successfully lifted out of the water for further testing. [8] Following the initial experiment, Microsoft wanted the next prototype to be larger in size, deployed in harsher conditions, and powered with renewable energy.
Microsoft invited a group of marine organization to submit proposals to realize the second phase of the project. Naval Group, a French defense contractor, was selected to lead in the design and deployment of the project. [9] The Natick Phase 2 vessel was deployed in June 1, 2018 off the coast of Orkney. The vessel stayed underwater for over two years. During the COVID-19 pandemic, the undersea data center was employed to process workloads for vaccine research via Folding@home. [10] [11] In July 2020, the vessel was successfully lifted out of the water and retrieved for analysis. [12]
Scottish Renewables awarded Microsoft the Carbon Reduction Award in 2018. [13] Additionally, the project showed that 864 servers could run reliably for two years with cooling provided by the natural sea temperature. [14] A United States Department of Energy report used Project Natick as an example that "marine energy combined with storage and potentially other renewable energy sources could provide the power or partial power for [data centers]." [15]
Sonar is a technique that uses sound propagation to navigate, measure distances (ranging), communicate with or detect objects on or under the surface of the water, such as other vessels.
A buoy is a floating device that can have many purposes. It can be anchored (stationary) or allowed to drift with ocean currents.
A compressed-air car is a compressed-air vehicle powered by pressure vessels filled with compressed air. It is propelled by the release and expansion of the air within a motor adapted to compressed air. The car might be powered solely by air, or combined with other fuels such as gasoline, diesel, or an electric plant with regenerative braking.
A data center or data centre is a building, a dedicated space within a building, or a group of buildings used to house computer systems and associated components, such as telecommunications and storage systems.
The SOFAR channel, or deep sound channel (DSC), is a horizontal layer of water in the ocean at which depth the speed of sound is at its minimum. The SOFAR channel acts as a waveguide for sound, and low frequency sound waves within the channel may travel thousands of miles before dissipating. An example was reception of coded signals generated by the Navy chartered ocean surveillance vessel Cory Chouest off Heard Island, located in the southern Indian Ocean, by hydrophones in portions of all five major ocean basins and as distant as the North Atlantic and North Pacific.
Underwater habitats are underwater structures in which people can live for extended periods and carry out most of the basic human functions of a 24-hour day, such as working, resting, eating, attending to personal hygiene, and sleeping. In this context, 'habitat' is generally used in a narrow sense to mean the interior and immediate exterior of the structure and its fixtures, but not its surrounding marine environment. Most early underwater habitats lacked regenerative systems for air, water, food, electricity, and other resources. However, some underwater habitats allow for these resources to be delivered using pipes, or generated within the habitat, rather than manually delivered.
An underwater glider is a type of autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV) that employs variable-buoyancy propulsion instead of traditional propellers or thrusters. It employs variable buoyancy in a similar way to a profiling float, but unlike a float, which can move only up and down, an underwater glider is fitted with hydrofoils that allow it to glide forward while descending through the water. At a certain depth, the glider switches to positive buoyancy to climb back up and forward, and the cycle is then repeated.
Urs Hölzle is a Swiss software engineer and technology executive. As Google's eighth employee and its first VP of Engineering, he has shaped much of Google's development processes and infrastructure, as well as its engineering culture. His most notable contributions include leading the development of fundamental cloud infrastructure such as energy-efficient data centers, distributed compute and storage systems, and software-defined networking. Until July 2023, he was the Senior Vice President of Technical Infrastructure and Google Fellow at Google. In July 2023, he transitioned to being a Google Fellow only.
Unmanned underwater vehicles (UUV), also known as uncrewed underwater vehicles and underwater drones, are submersible vehicles that can operate underwater without a human occupant. These vehicles may be divided into two categories: remotely operated underwater vehicles (ROUVs) and autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs). ROUVs are remotely controlled by a human operator. AUVs are automated and operate independently of direct human input.
Sun Modular Datacenter is a portable data center built into a standard 20-foot intermodal container manufactured and marketed by Sun Microsystems. An external chiller and power were required for the operation of a Sun MD. A data center of up to 280 servers could be rapidly deployed by shipping the container in a regular way to locations that might not be suitable for a building or another structure, and connecting it to the required infrastructure. Sun stated that the system could be made operational for 1% of the cost of building a traditional data center.
An unmanned surface vehicle, unmanned surface vessel or uncrewed surface vessel (USV), colloqually called a drone boat, drone ship or sea drone, is a boat or ship that operates on the surface of the water without a crew. USVs operate with various levels of autonomy, from remote control to fully autonomous surface vehicles (ASV).
A wet sub is a type of underwater vehicle, either a submarine or a submersible, that does not provide a dry environment for its occupants. It is also described as an underwater vehicle where occupants are exposed to ambient environment during operations. The watercraft is classified as medium-sized or small vessel. This type of submarine differs from other underwater personal transport devices by the fact that it has a hull around it and it is not a "bare bones" design.
Subsea technology involves fully submerged ocean equipment, operations, or applications, especially when some distance offshore, in deep ocean waters, or on the seabed. The term subsea is frequently used in connection with oceanography, marine or ocean engineering, ocean exploration, remotely operated vehicle (ROVs) autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs), submarine communications or power cables, seafloor mineral mining, oil and gas, and offshore wind power.
The European Marine Energy Centre (EMEC) Ltd is a UKAS accredited test and research center focused on wave and tidal power development, based in the Orkney Islands, UK. The centre provides developers with the opportunity to test full-scale grid-connected prototype devices in wave and tidal conditions.
Power usage effectiveness (PUE) is a ratio that describes how efficiently a computer data center uses energy; specifically, how much energy is used by the computing equipment.
Verne Global is a UK-headquartered company that provides data center solutions for enterprise and hyperscalers. It provides colocation and cloud services to a variety of enterprises and hyperscalers across financial services, earth sciences, life sciences, engineering, scientific research and AI including BMW, Volkswagen, Earlham Institute, DeepL, Peptone, Threatmetrix, Datto
A tidal stream generator, often referred to as a tidal energy converter (TEC), is a machine that extracts energy from moving masses of water, in particular tides, although the term is often used in reference to machines designed to extract energy from run of river or tidal estuarine sites. Certain types of these machines function very much like underwater wind turbines, and are thus often referred to as tidal turbines. They were first conceived in the 1970s during the oil crisis.
A microDataCenter contains compute, storage, power, cooling and networking in a very small volume, sometimes also called a "DataCenter-in-a-box". The term has been used to describe various incarnations of this idea over the past 20 years. Late 2017 a very tightly integrated version was shown at SuperComputing conference 2017: the DOME microDataCenter. Key features are its hot-watercooling, fully solid-state and being built with commodity components and standards only.
Immersion cooling, also known as "direct liquid cooling", is a technique used for computer cooling, battery cooling, and motor cooling in which electrical and electronic components, including complete servers and storage devices, are mostly or fully submerged in a thermally conductive but electrically insulating liquid coolant. Heat is removed from a system by putting the coolant in direct contact with hot components, and circulating the heated liquid through heat exchangers. This practice is highly effective because liquid coolants can absorb more heat from the system, and are more easily circulated through the system, than air.
Underwater domain awareness (UDA) is the aspect of maritime domain awareness focused on the underwater sector, including, from a security perspective, sea lines of communication (SLOC), coastal waters and varied maritime assets with reference to hostile intent and the proliferation of submarine and mine capabilities intended to limit access to the seas and littoral waters. The military requirement is not the only motivation for undersea domain awareness. The earth's undersea geophysical activities as they relate to the well-being of humans is also relevant, as monitoring such activities can provide vital clues to minimize the impact of devastating natural disasters.