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Google mystery barge departs Maine for Boston, where it will be scrapped

The Portland Press Herald reports a giant box on a barge built by Google for God knows what reason left the Maine port Tuesday for a trip down our way for dismantling. Seems Google never actually used the shell for anything.

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Someone in tech told me these may have been floating experiments for an "Android Store" that was tested somewhere in California that failed miserably.

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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_barges

Sounds like another tech industry ego project.

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That seems incredibly wasteful.

But that cant be, Google is a highly respected private company and I have it on good authority that when you run things like a business theres never waste.

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Another hypothesis was that the barges would serve as near-shore sea-faring data centers utilizing wave energy for power, and sea water for cooling servers.

Reasons given include Google's 2009 patent for water-based data centers, the established practice of using shipping containers to house servers, Google's history of locating data centers in places with inexpensive cooling,

Google's previous use of seawater for natural cooling at its Hamina, Finland data center, the absence of windows in the containers (making them less suitable for human habitation), and Google's history of secrecy regarding its data centers, a core competitive advantage

Gurgle's biggest problem at this time is keeping up with bandwidth demand from Android sales.

They throttle Plus down in the early day Eastern when Asia, Europe and the US East Coast are all active. Then, as the planet goes to sleep, the thing works the way it is supposed to again.

They've been fascinated with wave motion energy and sea water as a cooling because server farms are insanely expensive.

There's also a firm around here, http://www.free-flow-power.com/home that is working on water flow turbines as the next generation beyond dams.

It started in Gloucester but is now, evidently, on Causeway street. Mass has some very interesting alt energy work going on.

It would be funny if Guggles wants to figure out that tech.

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