Facebook's Newest Datacenter Relies On Arctic Cooling 106
Nerval's Lobster writes "One year and seven months after beginning construction, Facebook has brought its first datacenter on foreign soil online. That soil is in Lulea, town of 75,000 people on northern Sweden's east coast, just miles south of the boundary separating the Arctic Circle from the somewhat-less-frigid land below it. Lulea (also nicknamed The Node Pole for the number of datacenters in the area) is in the coldest area of Sweden and shares the same latitude as Fairbanks, Alaska, according to a local booster site. The constant, biting wind may have stunted the growth of Lulea's tourism industry, but it has proven a big factor in luring big IT facilities into the area. Datacenters in Lulea are just as difficult to power and cool as any other concentrated mass of IT equipment, but their owners can slash the cost of cooling all those servers and storage units simply by opening a window: the temperature in Lulea hasn't stayed at or above 86 degrees Fahrenheit for 24 hours since 1961, and the average temperature is a bracing 29.6 Fahrenheit. Air cooling might prove a partial substitute for powered environmental control, but Facebook's datacenter still needed 120megawatts of steady power to keep the social servers humming. Sweden has among the lowest electricity costs in Europe, and the Lulea area reportedly has among the lowest power costs in Sweden. Low electricity prices are at least partly due to the area's proximity to the powerful Lulea River and the line of hydroelectric dams that draw power from it."
Not for long... (Score:5, Funny)
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With all those datacenters the town won't be that cold for long.
From TFS: "The constant, biting wind may have stunted the growth of Lulea's tourism industry..."
If they just build the datacenter a little ways outside town, I imagine the people there wouldn't notice a significant change in temperature.
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They make steel which uses a bit more heat. (Score:4, Informative)
Luleå is the main port for Swedish steel, and there is quite a lot of it. So the powerusage of that data center is puny in comparision.
Re:Not for long... (Score:5, Insightful)
You might want to look into HipHop [github.com] a bit. It's rather quite nice.
Also the fact that a behemoth like FB can run as it is written in PHP is more of a commentary on the value of your post.
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Sounds awful.
Ugh.
Re:Not for long... (Score:5, Interesting)
When you're developing a system on the scale of FaceBook and running on a language like PHP and the article is about building yet another data center with a 120 megawatt draw, maybe the comment you're responding to could have some value.
Let's imagine for a moment that having two departments of developers, one who designs and builds a PHP version of the site and a second who reimplements the functionality using more optimal languages... we can see these people as being human compilers. When you're running a system on this scale, if you can improve performance of your code by 10% by using a more optimal language, you could effectively reduce your need for power by 10%. When you're measuring your power consumption in hundreds of megawatts, somehow, I figure that might be attractive.
So, let's suggest for a moment that UI designers and database developers aren't always the most optimal coders. I know, who'd have though? Now let's imagine that there's programmers who adore sitting around cutting a few clock cycles off here and there (there are). While PHP may give you a huge amount of flexibility, it comes at a huge cost. It requires developers to use a huge amount of string processing to accomplish relatively trivial tasks. PHP makes it look like a single line of code, but in reality, that single line, if substituted with a few lines of hand optimized code could use less than a hundredth of the CPU power. Now consider that even with projects like HipHop, the code given to the system is heavily burdened with table lookups which can't be replaced programatically by an optimal compiler.
So, I'm going to give both of your statements merit. First because you're defending the technology as an enabler. He's bashing the technology because of lack of efficiency. I agree with you that PHP scales fantastically in this case, that however does not mean it does it in an optimal fashion which I think should be seen as the spirit of his posting.
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In just about every way PHP makes even perl code written by a newbie look fast and secure, let alone comparing it to compiled code.
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could be worse... they could be running on ASSp
Poor long term planning. (Score:1)
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In 2100 they'll probably still be a lot cooler than Kansas.
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Kansas would be a great place for wind farms. I have found that I can't open the umbrella on my lawn furniture for fear it may blow away. Unfortunately the city ordinance will not allow me to have a wind turbine. I think they are afraid I'll not have to pay an electric bill.
Re:Poor long term planning. (Score:5, Funny)
Thanks to global warming they won't be cool for much longer.
Actually, now the climate change denialists can say that shrinking of the polar icecaps isn't due to CO2, it is just facebook servers.
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Quick, someone make a graph that shows the growth of facebook closely correlating to the rise in temperatures.
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if they just plonked their datacenter on antarctic ice it would eventually melt into the ice and would create its own ice chest when the water above it refreezed... it would be even cooler if they made the datacenter as a huge pyramid that reconfigured itself every 10 minutes
Energy from Ambient Temperature (Score:1)
If there were just a way to extract energy from the ambient environment in some sort of reasonably efficient fashion we could build these datacenters in warmer areas, deserts even. All that 120-degree desert in africa would suddenly become valuable real-estate.
Re:Energy from Ambient Temperature (Score:5, Interesting)
Heat needs somewhere to flow to, in order to make it valuable as a power source. Simply being very hot isn't sufficient. That said, the amount of light falling on the region IS directly usable as a power source, and with very little population or wildlife to disturb, this may prove quite an attractive place to gather solar power. Since transmission of power is one of its major cost factors, the data centers may well follow.
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this? you mean lulea? you got any idea how dark it is during winter and even if the daylight is longer in the summer it goes through longer in the atmosphere losing some of the energy.
in africa you could get heat difference though quite easily. just dig a hole.
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That's how they use solar power is used at Dome A deep in Antarctica, but with the panels pointed north of course.
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I was referring to the poster who proposed using the heat of the Sahara as a power source. Plenty of sunlight there.
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If there were just a way to extract energy from the ambient environment
There isn't. You can extract energy only by dumping the energy/heat of the ambient environment to a lower temperature or lower potential environment.
Having said that, most weather is due to a transfer of heat from the ambient environment (which in turn has been heated by considerable solar radiation) to space. And we can in turn harvest some of that energy transfer via wind or hydroelectric power.
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A planet wide system of tubes and turbines can be used to extract energy of expanding gas... However, you'll be harvesting your planet's angular momentum. I don't recommend it, especially not while your crust and mantle are full of radioactive elements still.
Makes Perfect Sense (Score:5, Insightful)
I know a lot of ./ is gonna come at this from a "those greedy scum bags" point of view, but this makes perfect sense from an overall humanity point of view, not just a greedy corporation point of view. Put power hungry stuff in a place where the power doesn't spew CO2 into the atmosphere thanks to hydroelectric. Someplace where they can use much less power by taking advantage of the outside cold. This is how it should be.
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Perhaps it's not enough impact, but the question remains
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Are you some kind of an idiot or something?
That one is open to debate, but I can say for certain that I'm not a coward.
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shutting fb down would help the environment only if people didn't do something else with their time that used less energy.
anyway, the datacenter is unlikely to make less heat than a single small paper mill... or steel mill...which is the type of industrial activity these datacenters are replacing in the nordic region.
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i think it largely depends on how many datacenters it takes to change a light bulb
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I know a lot of ./ is gonna...
It's /. you insensitive clod!
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I don't count your production of 123 TWh of 2010 as "insane". Sweden produced 143 TWh the same year.
And as you know, our two electric grids are joined and the power is sold on a common market.
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Very well, but at least dedicate the effort to a worthy cause like Protein Folding, SETI processing or even a Library-of-Congress sized recipe book - the idiocracy present on facebook can fuck off and die for all I care.
Its Externalizing costs (Score:2)
What they are doing is using the free cold to cut their costs. But of course that heating will effect the weather in that area, which will affect the ecosystem which will start to spread its effect. There may be widespread and deeply felt consequences down the road, but not for Facebook. Dumping heat is the same sort of externalized cost as say dumping waste chemicals in a stream. The company does not pay, it lets those downstream pay. You could argue that the effect is small but as we know the butterfly e
Average Temp = -1.3 Celsius (Score:5, Informative)
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For those who believe the freezing and boiling points of water also make good reference points.
Well, I'm glad you put the temperature in F as well, since I find the body temperature of a cow very much more intuitive.
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I don't stick my hand into freezing or boiling water really any more than I have to, but I go outside every day.
I'll cheerfully take my reference points being (broadly) the coldest/warmest people in temperate climes experience personally as far more useful than your particularly arbitrary references, thanks!
That isn't very cold (Score:3, Interesting)
Thanks to wind and ocean currents all of Europe is warmer than many places in North America at the same latitude. Wisconsin gets colder than this place. I think it has more to do with abundant water and better year round temperature consistency.
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Also, a data center in Wisconsin is going to get worse latency than a data center in Sweden for European Facebook users.
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Wisconsin also gets warmer than this place, though.
2GB data for everyone man woman on Internet (Score:1)
The NSA will gets $4 billion budget for cyber operations. Say 10% is spent on data storage, and they pay way over the odds at $100/TB.
$400,000,000 / 100 = 4,000,000 Terabytes = 4 Billion Gigabytes
2 billion people online = 2 GB per person per year
And that's why they have huge data centers and projects to build two more stretching into 2016.
Or alternatively, since it's mostly Americans getting spied on, more like 13GB per US citizen per year, from just 10% of their budget.
That's enough for phone meta data, me
Heat (Score:5, Interesting)
Lulea is a major center of the iron mining industry of northern Sweden, which produces massive amounts of waste heat. This is used to great advantage by the town already, and when Facebook asked the town if they should just went into the atmosphere or if they wanted to use the waste heat, the town said "no, thank you." Source: I'm a native of Lulea.
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The datacenter is going to produce low grade heat. Not useful for much.
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you should be more concerned about the datacenter chugging out endless clouds of stupid
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If you are, why do you spell it wrong? Either Luleå, or Luleaa if you are on a non-Nordic keyboard.
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Lule is also acceptable if trying to approximate how the name of the city is normally pronounced.
It's Like Guantanamo (Score:1)
The US Constitution doesn't apply to datacenters not on US soil, right?
Sweden has an NSA style snoop law (Score:1)
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/10/31/facebook_swedish_data_centre_privacy_law/
"A controversial Swedish internet surveillance law passed in 2008 allows the government there to intercept any internet traffic that passes Sweden's borders with no need for a court warrant. It's called the FRA law and the Swedes don't like it, and Google called it "unfit for a Western democracy". And the rest of Europe could start to get annoyed by it too when that internet traffic includes their Facebook data."
That's why they
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As you say, FRA (Swedish NSA) is best buddies with NSA. I assume that everything FRA knows is immediately shared with NSA.
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Do we know what they use for heatsinks, fans, or maybe water cooling components?
they probably just open the windows
FB (Score:1)
When I read the title... (Score:1)
Electricity (Score:1)
Something the article forgot to mention is that it's not just the cost of electricity but also the reliability, Luleå hasn't had a major power outage since 1979.
Spelling and pronounciation (Score:5, Informative)
Get your spelling right. It's "Luleå", not "Lulea".
The first one is pronounced like "lu-leh-oh", the second would be "lu-leh-ah".
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Also, if someone is posting an article with temperatures, always include Celcius (or perhaps Kelvin). Farenheit means little to most of us who don't live in the US.
Sure, it only requires a quick conversion, but it's better that the writer does that once than to expect many readers to.
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...you got me on my knees, lu-leh...
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In fact, the temperature has not been higher than 30C/86F for more than 24 hours in total since 1961
Heated streets (Score:2)
So instead of raining in data centres... (Score:2)
Maybe its a good thing (Score:2)
Does this mean Facebook must apply the EU privacy policies to all users that may have data stored in the new datacentre?
Would Iceland have been better? (Score:1)
Another good place to host the datacenter would have been iceland. Its winters are not as cold, but the summers are significantly colder. The average high in July is 14 C, compared with 20 in Lulea). It also has abundant, cheap geothermal energy, which makes it popular for aluminium production. To service one of the aluminium plants there, a 630 MW power station was built. Until then, the total power consumption of Iceland had been about 300 MW! According to this table [wikipedia.org], the price of electricity in Iceland i
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i would love to see a US government reaction to a proposal by Facebook to build a datacenter in Siberia... of course it wouldn't happen... maybe it would start another cold war, which would also be good for datacenters :)