When the building, power, cooling, and compute is one integrated system its like a really really big PC cabinet.
Which makes it all more interesting. Seeing how they engineered to building to work somewhat like an old VW bug engine (the building uses water to cool, the engine uses oil) is very cool. Made think of how, in the not so far future, we might be building cities with data infrastructure as part of the regular utilities. And I don't mean cabling or optic fiber, but how we might use water from the sewers to cool down some underground datacenter. I might even see datacenters being spread alongside sewers. As the hardware becomes smaller, we might just create a data center in a tube and cool it with dirty water. Who knows?
Way ahead of you :-) I made up some plans for a 'pocket' data center (think pocket battleship). In the past such things have been infeasible because the scale was needed to achieve the economics, but advances in energy deployment and network design have created an opportunity here. Now we just need $25M to build one :-)
Given how Instagram is "valued" at one billion dollars (was it two?) I don't see how you would have much trouble raising twenty five million for something as game changing as that.
Your pocket data center sure opens up a lot of possibilities. A cell phone datacenter. Well, sort of like
a high powered botnet built around cell phones.
You get funding, I board a plane to wherever you build this, and help you hack it. :)
Which makes it all more interesting. Seeing how they engineered to building to work somewhat like an old VW bug engine (the building uses water to cool, the engine uses oil) is very cool. Made think of how, in the not so far future, we might be building cities with data infrastructure as part of the regular utilities. And I don't mean cabling or optic fiber, but how we might use water from the sewers to cool down some underground datacenter. I might even see datacenters being spread alongside sewers. As the hardware becomes smaller, we might just create a data center in a tube and cool it with dirty water. Who knows?