New Google Takes Technology Where it Has Never Been Before
“The objective is to provide an analog close to space where the consequences are really life and death,” said Marc Reagan, mission commander for NASA’s sixth Extreme Environment Mission Operations program or NEEMO. “Rookies can make their mistakes before they get to space.”
On July 23, 2004, an astronaut by the name of Dave Williams was diving into the sea after assisting in the building of the International Space Station in the year 1998. The underwater habitat that he was entering was called Aquarius, located under the Florida Keys and part of the NASA training site—a NASA marine laboratory that trained 50-year old Williams and many others for their expeditions into space, Mars, and the moon—along with many new developments of technology for these expeditions.
Today, in 2008, underwater work is still going on but in different ways, with Google applying for a patent that is considered a “water-based data center.” With this in mind, THE NEW YORK TIMES: TECHNOLOGY article states that Google would be able to create “mobile data center platforms at sea by stacking containers with servers, storage systems, and networking gear on barges or other platforms. ” The whole idea allows Google to push computing centers closer to people where it normally would not be feasible, cost-effective or as efficient to build a data center on land.
The energy gained for the powering of these centers is from water splashing against the sides of barges. “In general, computing centers are located on a ship or ships, which are then anchored in a water body from which energy from natural motion of the water may be captured, and turned into electricity and/or pumping power for cooling pumps to carry heat away from computers in the data center,” Google writes in the patent application. Considered extremely unique, Google is one of the major service providers willing to do custom work on data center equipment, building its own servers and networking equipment.
Patents cannot remove something from the public domain, but instead must be very useful and brand new. The entire purpose of a patent is to encourage one group of people or a person to teach someone else or another group how to do something new. And until someone gets a patent and describes it, it is considered something new and different.
This entry was posted on Friday, September 12th, 2008 at 11:20 pm and is filed under Public Relations, Space Agency News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
