MIT Thirsty Algorithms
Interactive Data Visualization
Thirsty Algorithms was created with Sarah Williams and the Norman B. Leventhal Center for Advanced Urbanism (LCAU) at MIT.
The installation consists of an ambient loop in which the tank fills and empties in relation to already-online and planned datacenter buildouts. Visitors use a keypad to explore the water usage of various cooling architectures used in datacenters, such as evaporative cooling, air cooling and closed-loop (or recycled water) cooling.
A geo-located map of datacenters forms the 'spouts' on the ceiling of the tank, progressively opened to reflect new data centers coming online over the next several years. As the tank fills, planned datacenters begin to emit sediment as well, re-creating a map of anticipated datacenters on the tank floor as the sediment settles.
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