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Comment by faeriol | Hacker News Reader

The region should have become the Datacenter capital of North-America...

Cold temperatures, Cheap (and renewable) power...

Any idea what would a data center pay per year for cooling? Would it be worthwhile to build in a cooler location where cooling would be free in the winter?

And maybe even (somehow) freeze water in the winter and melt it in the summer to provide additional "free" cooling? (Might be a bit of a stretch)

Now for cooling, the montreal region has subzero temps from lateish november to somthing like almost april... Apparently Wikipedia has a half decent article. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Temperature_in_Canada

Not sure about that freeze water in the winter and use it in the summer idea at such a low latitude...

But yes, using an artificial lake (or even a real one... given the population does not go bersek about protecting the wildlife) as a heat echanger might be an idea. Lake would most likely come close to freezing in the winter (need to engineer this properly) but in the summer you could get water from the depths to provide extra cooling power. Idea, put a beach there, get cheers from the population.

Other idea: run a river from up north in your datacenter and you've got a nice cooling strategy for basically... free. Better idea yet... Build the datacenter on top of the hydroelectric damn... Last thing to do is to run the lines... Not like Quebec had not mastered running lines over hundreds of kilometers anyways, they've been importing power from the north for decades.

Water is most dense around 4°C. Accordingly the bottom of a large body like the great lakes is near that temperature year round. This is part of the reason why fish can survive in lakes that freeze over in the winter.

This is exploited in deep water source cooling [1].

Such a thing is implemented in Lake Ontario since 2004.

Very cool imo :)

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_water_source_cooling

I got an even better idea. Why not build the datacenter inside the hydroelectric dam? You get electricity from the turbines and cooling from the artificial lake at what's likely to be a high altitude. Now all you need it rock solid connectivity but you've got an incredibly small carbon footprint.

A lot factors go into picking data center locations, ambient temperature being one of them.

Other factors include network connectivity, risk of local government wanting to access data, price of electricity (you still have to power machines, even if you get cooling for free), labor cost to build/maintain the center, proximity to an airport, risks of natural disasters, etc.

> Should have

Is there a reason it didn't? (i'm not "in the know")

Shit internet up until recently.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Montreal_Internet_Exchange

40GB/s??? How does amazon expect to put an entire region in there and to share the 40GB/s with the other hosts already up there (OVH)?

If we believe the Cacti graphs, over the past several weeks the Montréal QIX peaked at 50Gbps[1]. Your comment implies that the QIX might be running over a mere 40Gbps link, but presumably their aggregate link capacity is (much?) higher than that.

[1] http://www.qix.ca/en/qix/network

Amazon connections between regions are owned by Amazon. Only last mile traffic would need to go to an Exchange.

"averaging 40gbps" != "maximum 40gbps"

Also, qix puts their member list online, and Amazon has a 10gbps port: http://www.qix.ca/en/members/membership

From 2013: "deployed over 180 Gbps of capacity into the exchange." https://www.cologix.com/pdf/QIX-Case-Study.pdf

That's 40gbps of voluntary (technically settlement free, but not in the usual meaning of the term) peering, not paid transit. Paid transit numbers are several orders of magnitude higher, and total traffic numbers are unknown.

Yes that has been a problem... Let me tell you, everybody would have been investing in the infrastructure if there had been a social desire to actually attract datacenters...

Nobody will invest in good internet lines if the only thing to go around is middle-aged people who think the internet is useless...

They put business people in charge of the Electrical company instead of engineers...

Service quality went down, new projects were put on hold, and investments in new technology was basically killed... Prices went up too.

Quebec has nationalized electricity and really missed the boat for newer technology.

until very recently the competition for serious backbone IP carriers in major canadian cities (vancouver, calgary, montreal, toronto) was terrible and much higher priced compared to buying IP transit in a place like seattle, chicago, north virginia, NYC, los angeles, etc.

You need proximity to a ton of people to become the Datacenter capital; I doubt Montreal qualifies.

Montreal is the 19th largest metropolitan area in North America. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_North_American_metropo...

It's also very close to the American North East for data transfer...

600km(~360 miles) by road from NYC... Could possibly be worthwhile if the energy is significantly cheaper*

* Pure speculation on my part

I think the GTA has as many people ~8 million as all of Quebec ~8 million.

No, GTA is ~6M and Greater Montreal ~4 GTA is not that big in terms of population and very sparse comparable with other big metros.

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