Crazazy! According the UK’s Times Online, Google is considering storing some if their data centers on floating barges over seven miles off the California coast. My mind immediately suspected they wanted to keep them away from the government’s prying eyes or for some other sinister reason. Apparently, not so:
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.
While Google could also save on property taxes should they go the offshore route, this commitment to energy conservation by major corporations is encouraging. I don’t know that I’d keep large information centers in Siberia, however. If we piss of the Ruskies by letting some inexperienced Vice Presidential candidate threaten them with warfare, all they’d have to do is a lob a few missiles “accidentally” in the direction of the supercomputers and we’d be neck-deep in economic quagmire hell. The intertwining of geopolitics and economics can be more interesting than a back-from-the-dead plot line on Days of Our Lives! No, I’m not going overboard.
POLITICAL BLIP 