Ocean warming events resilience capability in underwater computing platforms

Abstract

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%.