Periola A A, Alonge A A, Ogudo K A
Electrical, Electronic, and Computer Engineering, Cape Peninsula University of Technology, Cape Town, South Africa.
Electrical and Electronic Engineering Technology, University of Johannesburg, Johannesburg, South Africa.
Sci Rep. 2024 Feb 15;14(1):3781. doi: 10.1038/s41598-024-54050-8.
Underwater data centers (UDCs) use the ocean's cold-water resources for free cooling and have low cooling costs. However, UDC cooling is affected by marine heat waves, and underwater seismic events thereby affecting UDC functioning continuity. Though feasible, the use of reservoirs for UDC cooling is non-scalable due to the high computing overhead, and inability to support continuity for long duration marine heat waves. The presented research proposes a mobile UDC (capable of migration) to address this challenge. The proposed UDC migrates from high underwater ground displacement ocean regions to regions having no or small underwater ground displacement. It supports multiple client underwater applications without requiring clients to develop, deploy, and launch own UDCs. The manner of resource utilization is influenced by the client's service level agreement. Hence, the proposed UDC provides resilient services to the clients and the requiring applications. Analysis shows that using the mobile UDC instead of the existing reservoir UDC approach enhances the operational duration and power usage effectiveness by 8.9-48.5% and 55.6-70.7% on average, respectively. In addition, the overhead is reduced by an average of 95.8-99.4%.
水下数据中心（UDC）利用海洋的冷水资源进行自然冷却，冷却成本较低。然而，UDC的冷却会受到海洋热浪以及水下地震事件的影响，进而影响UDC运行的连续性。尽管利用水库进行UDC冷却可行，但由于计算开销大且无法支持长时间海洋热浪期间的连续性，这种方式不可扩展。本文提出的研究建议采用可移动的UDC（能够迁移）来应对这一挑战。所提出的UDC从水下地面位移大的海洋区域迁移到水下地面位移小或没有水下地面位移的区域。它支持多个客户端水下应用，而无需客户端自行开发、部署和启动UDC。资源利用方式受客户端服务水平协议的影响。因此，所提出的UDC为客户端和所需应用提供弹性服务。分析表明，使用移动UDC而非现有的水库UDC方法，平均可分别将运行时长和能源使用效率提高8.9 - 48.5%和55.6 - 70.7%。此外，开销平均降低95.8 - 99.4%。
