Acoustic Attacks Could Be A Serious Threat To The Future Of Underwater Data Centers

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

From Microsoft's Project Natick to China's Hainan Undersea Data Center Demonstration Development Project, we've seen data centers being placed underwater for years, saving precious land space and providing a dust-free, oxygen-free environment, which can protect electronics and help reduce faults.

The biggest benefit of these data centers is the surrounding cold water that helps carry away heat. In the case of the Hainan facility, the cold seawater is forecast to save 122 million kilowatt-hours of electricity and 105,000 tons of freshwater annually.

Now, researchers at the University of Florida and the University of Electro-Communications in Japan have found a vulnerability in underwater data centers. All it takes are sound waves directed at the structures. Just a pool speaker playing a high D note - carried by the dense water - could have a significant impact.

The study detailed how sound at the resonant frequency of the hard disk drives causes vibrations at a given velocity and intensity directly proportional to the sound pressure level, affecting the read/write performance of the disk.

"The main advantages of having a data center underwater are the free cooling and the isolation from variable environments on land," said Md Jahidul Islam, Ph.D., a professor of electrical and computer engineering at UF and co-author of the paper. "But these two advantages can also become liabilities, because the dense water carries acoustic signals faster than in air, and the isolated data center is difficult to monitor or to service if components break."

Tests were carried out in a lab-based water tank and in a lake on UF campus. An off-the-shelf underwater speaker playing music tuned to 5.1-5.3 kHz caused a Supermicro rack server configured with RAID 5 storage to experience "consistent throughput degradation."

Read more of this story at SoylentNews.