It’s well worth visiting the Museum of Global Communications at Porthcurno in Cornwall UK which has displays showing the history of submarine cable-laying ships and telegraphy equipment. Porthcurno beach is where the early cables came ashore in the UK and there is a hut on the beach where you can see them. Connecting all those cables, both the subsea and overland ones are routers which, if say a subsea cable between the UK and the USA breaks, will automatically re-route internet traffic to an alternative route (cable) between the UK and the USA. There are several transatlantic cables providing alternative routes, and they have spare capacity. No so in the Tonga example – one island, one cable, one route.
Some data centres aggregate colossal amounts of international internet traffic, using many thousands of routers, thus the standby diesel generators in case they lose utility power – 60 Hudson Street (New York) and Telehouse (London) are prime examples of data centres that, if they went offline, we would notice.
Data centres are not environmentally friendly, 50% of several megawatts of power to run the equipment turning to heat and the other 50% to cool things down (the efficiency ratio can vary). Iceland is a nice place for data centres, green geo-thermal power for the equipment and open the windows (sort of) to cool it down. Iceland is connected by 4 subsea cables – 3 to Europe and 1 to North America. Green electricity will hopefully make data centres less environmentally unfriendly over time but may take years. Given that the computing used to generate cryptocurrency (aka mining) uses massive amounts of electricity this can’t come soon enough. Cryptocurrency mining is estimated to consume between 120 and 240 billion kilowatt-hours per year, a range that exceeds the total annual electricity usage of many individual countries, such as Argentina or Australia.
Another amazing example of why I love reader comments. Added this to the list of things to visit on my next trip to Cornwall! (And yes, the crypto stuff is mind boggling).
That's interesting. Microsoft's Project Natick was, by most accounts, a successful proof of concept, but I'd not heard of anything going to market until now. The issue is power and network redundancy – clearly the pods cannot fire up a diesel generator if they lose utility power so they will need to be connected to two divergent power feeds from (typically) two substations to provide power redundancy, which will be expensive (the distances between substations is typically several miles). Data redundancy can be achieved with two divergent fibre optic cables, less expensive because the cables don’t need to find separate sub stations - they just need to be kept apart so that both cannot be cut by the same JCB ! Now if you place a bunch of pods near an offshore wind farm I assume you can hook into the wind farm power grid and get power redundancy that way -not dissimilar in concept to the Chinese Highlander undersea data centre. Most, but not all, computing workloads are time critical, thus a pod going offline for several hours while utility power is restored won’t fly – but if all a pod does, for example, is mine cryptocurrency, then it doesn’t matter (too much). Disaster recovery, where one pod replicates the workload of another one in a different location, one primary and the other a backup (failover), is another use case I can see, and a very common computing requirement.
I have pinged Subsea Cloud a question about power redundancy – their FAQ is silent on this (unless I missed it). I will post what they tell me.
I had absolutely NO idea!! If I had actually ever thought about where the internet was located I would not have guessed in primitive undersea cables that are pretty much unprotected. Now I know about one more whopping huge thing that makes us vulnerable. I know that this information is important for (some of) us to know, but I personally just want to bury my head in the sand and hope that better minds are working on it. Thanks?
Thanks, that was very informative. I live in Nova Scotia which used to be a major landing site for transatlantic cables, back in the days when I assume cable operators were trying to minimize distance under water. You can still see ruins of abandoned cable landing sites in the middle of nowhere. As for the future, undersea cables are being looked at for monitoring what is going on in the deep ocean, including deep currents and advance detection of tsunamis. Folks in Europe for example should care because the ocean carries an awful lot of heat and shifts in how that heat moves could ruin the football season over there. As you can imagine, monitoring the deep ocean is very difficult and expensive. Instrumenting cables could cover a lot more ocean at lower cost.
It’s well worth visiting the Museum of Global Communications at Porthcurno in Cornwall UK which has displays showing the history of submarine cable-laying ships and telegraphy equipment. Porthcurno beach is where the early cables came ashore in the UK and there is a hut on the beach where you can see them. Connecting all those cables, both the subsea and overland ones are routers which, if say a subsea cable between the UK and the USA breaks, will automatically re-route internet traffic to an alternative route (cable) between the UK and the USA. There are several transatlantic cables providing alternative routes, and they have spare capacity. No so in the Tonga example – one island, one cable, one route.
Some data centres aggregate colossal amounts of international internet traffic, using many thousands of routers, thus the standby diesel generators in case they lose utility power – 60 Hudson Street (New York) and Telehouse (London) are prime examples of data centres that, if they went offline, we would notice.
Data centres are not environmentally friendly, 50% of several megawatts of power to run the equipment turning to heat and the other 50% to cool things down (the efficiency ratio can vary). Iceland is a nice place for data centres, green geo-thermal power for the equipment and open the windows (sort of) to cool it down. Iceland is connected by 4 subsea cables – 3 to Europe and 1 to North America. Green electricity will hopefully make data centres less environmentally unfriendly over time but may take years. Given that the computing used to generate cryptocurrency (aka mining) uses massive amounts of electricity this can’t come soon enough. Cryptocurrency mining is estimated to consume between 120 and 240 billion kilowatt-hours per year, a range that exceeds the total annual electricity usage of many individual countries, such as Argentina or Australia.
Another amazing example of why I love reader comments. Added this to the list of things to visit on my next trip to Cornwall! (And yes, the crypto stuff is mind boggling).
Thanks! this is so informative. Crypto guzzling energy is quite disturbing. Unlike blockchsin for valid business purposes, they are pure gambling
Thanks for this. I heard of undersea data centers for cooling and also security (hard to tamper with if they are deep enough). See https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/subsea-cloud-announces-three-underwater-data-center-projects/ for example. May be part of the solution set for the energy consumption problem.
That's interesting. Microsoft's Project Natick was, by most accounts, a successful proof of concept, but I'd not heard of anything going to market until now. The issue is power and network redundancy – clearly the pods cannot fire up a diesel generator if they lose utility power so they will need to be connected to two divergent power feeds from (typically) two substations to provide power redundancy, which will be expensive (the distances between substations is typically several miles). Data redundancy can be achieved with two divergent fibre optic cables, less expensive because the cables don’t need to find separate sub stations - they just need to be kept apart so that both cannot be cut by the same JCB ! Now if you place a bunch of pods near an offshore wind farm I assume you can hook into the wind farm power grid and get power redundancy that way -not dissimilar in concept to the Chinese Highlander undersea data centre. Most, but not all, computing workloads are time critical, thus a pod going offline for several hours while utility power is restored won’t fly – but if all a pod does, for example, is mine cryptocurrency, then it doesn’t matter (too much). Disaster recovery, where one pod replicates the workload of another one in a different location, one primary and the other a backup (failover), is another use case I can see, and a very common computing requirement.
I have pinged Subsea Cloud a question about power redundancy – their FAQ is silent on this (unless I missed it). I will post what they tell me.
It never ceases to amaze me how much interesting expertise lies with readers. Thanks for this - it’s fascinating.
I had absolutely NO idea!! If I had actually ever thought about where the internet was located I would not have guessed in primitive undersea cables that are pretty much unprotected. Now I know about one more whopping huge thing that makes us vulnerable. I know that this information is important for (some of) us to know, but I personally just want to bury my head in the sand and hope that better minds are working on it. Thanks?
Thanks, that was very informative. I live in Nova Scotia which used to be a major landing site for transatlantic cables, back in the days when I assume cable operators were trying to minimize distance under water. You can still see ruins of abandoned cable landing sites in the middle of nowhere. As for the future, undersea cables are being looked at for monitoring what is going on in the deep ocean, including deep currents and advance detection of tsunamis. Folks in Europe for example should care because the ocean carries an awful lot of heat and shifts in how that heat moves could ruin the football season over there. As you can imagine, monitoring the deep ocean is very difficult and expensive. Instrumenting cables could cover a lot more ocean at lower cost.