Photos: The world's weirdest datacentres

1 of 10 NEXT PREV

From Antarctic computing centres to former churches...

Today, datacentres can be found in the most unusual locations - anywhere from ice-locked ex-military bases to Spanish chapels.

silicon.com decided to round up some of the most interesting and remote locations around the world housing and processing computer data.

With the problems that datacentres have with cooling, the Antarctic is perhaps the ideal site for such a facility.

This is McMurdo station, home to the largest community in the South Pole and a scientific research centre for the US.

The station's datacentre is dedicated to supporting scientific work and running the station - with 64 servers and more than 2TB of storage connected to hundreds of desktops by a gigabit Ethernet network.

McMurdo Station is the telecoms hub for science projects, field camps and operations in western Antarctica funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF).

To provide these services, it has a central telephone exchange and a wide spectrum of network, radio-frequency and satellite-communication systems.

At the South Pole, every day up to 100GB of science data is transferred from the station to the US via satellite-communication links in support of multiple NSF-funded science projects.

Published: April 11, 2011 -- 12:00 GMT (05:00 PDT)
Photo by: Eli Duke

Caption by: Nick Heath
Located amid the colonnades and Romanesque arches of the Torre Girona chapel, MareNostrum is one of the fastest supercomputers in the world.

No longer a place of worship, today the chapel is the site of supercomputing research into computer, Earth and life sciences.

The machine has 10,240 IBM Power PC 970MP processors that have a combined peak performance of 94.21 teraflops.

In November 2010, it was ranked 118 in the list of the top 500 supercomputers in the world.

The supercomputer was built by the Spanish national and regional government and is used for research by a number of tech companies, including Microsoft and IBM.

Published: April 11, 2011 -- 12:00 GMT (05:00 PDT)
Photo by: Barcelona Supercomputing Center

Caption by: Nick Heath
As the name suggests, the superconducting super collider was a big deal, so big in fact it would have put the Large Hadron Collider to shame.

Unfortunately, the Texas-based particle accelerator was cancelled in 1993 after Congress deemed its projected $12bn price tag too expensive.

By the time the project was cancelled, 14 miles of tunnel had been dug for the accelerator and nearly $2bn had been spent on the project.

But science's loss is computing's gain - with the site now reportedly being marketed as a location for a tier III or IV datacentre.

Published: April 11, 2011 -- 12:00 GMT (05:00 PDT)
Photo by: Department of Energy

Caption by: Nick Heath
When it comes to datacentres, cold is good. So building a facility in a country with the word 'ice' in its name would seem to make perfect sense.

Verne Global is building a 45-acre datacentre complex in Iceland, on the former Nato airbase of Keflavik, seen here in active service.

Low temperatures all year round will allow the use of fresh air or naturally chilled water for cooling, with Verne Global claiming typical savings of 80 per cent over alternative methods.

All of Iceland's energy is produced by geothermal and hydroelectric energy, creating a 100 per cent green power supply for the datacentre.

Iceland's mid-Atlantic location allows for low millisecond connections to London and New York.

The area is relatively safe from natural disasters, with Verne Holding claiming the bedrock has very little chance of earthquakes and is situated away from volcanoes.

Published: April 11, 2011 -- 12:00 GMT (05:00 PDT)
Photo by: US Defense Imagery

Caption by: Nick Heath
It might pass for the lair of a James Bond supervillan but this former nuclear bunker is perhaps the world's most outlandish datacentre.

This co-location facility for Swedish internet service provider Bahnhof lies 100 feet below Stockholm, and is decked out with tropical plants, a waterfall, 600-plus gallon fish tank and craggy granite walls.

The servers are located in four caves, radiating from the centre of the bunker.

Building work on the bunker began in 1943, and the shelter was extended during the Cold War to become a civil defence bunker stocked with provisions and emergency vehicles.

The site's other claim to fame is hosting two servers for the Wikileaks whistleblower website.

Photos: Bahnhof

Published: April 11, 2011 -- 12:00 GMT (05:00 PDT)
Caption by: Nick Heath
One of the plans for the floating datacentre set out in Google's patent applicationPhoto: Google/ZDNet.com

Datacentres could be destined to leave dry land if search giant Google has its way.

In 2008, Google floated the idea of putting datacentres on platforms that would sit three to seven miles offshore, and won a patent for the idea in 2009.

Potential advantages range from the availability of wind and wave power and seawater cooling, to the absence of property taxes and building regulations.

Google envisions that the datacentres would be modular and constructed on land inside standard shipping containers before being hauled via truck to ships and then unloaded onto floating pontoons.

Published: April 11, 2011 -- 12:00 GMT (05:00 PDT)
Photo by: Louis Vest

Caption by: Nick Heath
Time to go deep underground for this next datacentre, into the caverns of a disused mine.

The datacentre is situated 100 metres underground in a coal mine in the Chubu region of Honshu, Japan's main island.

When complete, the facility will total 30 shipping containers, each holding about 250 servers and with about 10,000 processor cores available, although that number could be expanded to 30,000.

Cooling is provided by groundwater and the 15C temperature underground dispenses with the need for air conditioning outside the containers.

The datacentre was set up in 2007 by a joint venture made up of Sun, now owned by Oracle, and 11 other companies.

The group estimates that it could save $9m a year on electricity costs by removing the need for water coolers.

The containers are strong enough to withstand earthquakes of 6.7 on the Richter scale.

The picture above is not of the mine used for the Sun datacentre, but a coal mine tunnel in Pennsylvania.

Published: April 11, 2011 -- 12:00 GMT (05:00 PDT)
Photo by: zizzybaloobah

Caption by: Nick Heath
If you are looking for a secure place to store information, then inside a mountain seems a safe bet.

The Mountain Complex and Data Center offers three million square feet of space inside a mountain situated more than 100 feet above the top of the Table Rock Dam in the Ozark mountains of central US.

Inside the mountain there is a further 75 acres of undeveloped space, as seen here.

The facility's owners say the site is "nearly impervious" to catastrophes. Tornadoes blow over the site, floodwaters can't reach it and a "direct attack could not substantially harm The Mountain".

Published: April 11, 2011 -- 12:00 GMT (05:00 PDT)
Photo by: The Mountain Complex and Data Center

Caption by: Nick Heath
Beneath this Orthodox Christian cathedral in Helsinki is a datacentre designed to pipe heat to nearby homes.

The datacentre is located in a former WWII bunker carved into the rock below Uspenski Cathedral.

Heat from the hundreds of computer servers in the datacentre is captured and transferred to water-filled pipes and then used to heat homes in the Finnish capital.

The amount of heat transferred should be enough to heat about 500 homes.

The energy usage of the datacentre, used by IT services firm Academica, is designed to be half that of a typical datacentre.

Published: April 11, 2011 -- 12:00 GMT (05:00 PDT)
Photo by: Jrielaecher

Caption by: Nick Heath
This facility combines a datacentre with an arboretum that is used to grow plants to study climate change.

The Condorcet datacentre in Paris, France is designed to be energy efficient and uses waste energy to heat the arboretum.

Compared with a standard datacentre, Condorcet should reduce power consumption by 28 million kWh, which equates to 2,500 tonnes of CO2 per year.

The arboretum is designed to create climatic conditions similar to those predicted for France by 2050.

Published: April 11, 2011 -- 12:00 GMT (05:00 PDT)
Photo by: Telecity

Caption by: Nick Heath