PROJECT MANAGEMENT
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PROJECT NATICK VITAL STATS
• 40-foot container submerged off Orkney Islands
• Subsea docking structure is 14.3 metres long and 12.7 metres wide
• Payload of 12 racks containing 864 servers
• 27.6 petabytes of disk – enough for about 5 million movies
• 100 per cent powered by locally produced renewable energy in Orkney Islands
• Pods could be deployed within 90 days
• Target lifespan is 20 years
data analysis , the project was vital in processing workloads for a global , distributed computing project ( Folding @ home ) to understand the viral proteins that cause COVID-19 and design therapeutics to stop them .
Principal Researcher Spencer Fowers said phase 1 assessed the logistical and operational capability of having computers in water – oxygen and air moisture are not the best friends – and the second phase looked at whether it could be turned into a manufacturable , production-scale component . The container allows it to neatly fits onto a trailer and cargo ship – and the unit can be built to scale .
“ So far as we ’ ve been monitoring it . . . using the same components , we saw one-eighth the failure rate of the ocean centre as we do on land ,” he said . “ We ’ ve proven we can do the whole deployment process , now let ’ s finish the story and show that we can do the retrieval and do the recycling when it does reach end of life , and make sure that entire cycle is possible .” Admittedly , the Orkney Islands offered some unique attributes . Mike Sheppard , Senior R & D Engineer , said : “ Orkney is a great place for this partnership because they have renewable energy for 100 percent of their grid power . This project gives us the ability to feel like we ’ re working not just on computers and data centres but , moving forward , environmental responsibility as a company and individuals .” While variances in the availability of both power sources
AUTUMN / WINTER 2020