Google linked to mysterious floating structure at San Francisco bay

A four-floor high structure on a floating barge at Treasure Island, a former Navy base has aroused immense speculation.

According to an investigation by cnet.com,the structure may well be a secret Google undertaking complete with studied silence to queries.

According to the report, the structure and layers of secrecy around it strongly point to the likelihood of the structure being Google's floating data centre, for which the search giant had taken out a patent in 2009.

The 250-ft long barge was built in 2011. It is 72 feet wide, and 16 feet deep. The barge houses a four-story-tall modular building made from shipping containers.

A dozen white spires that rise 12 feet into the sky look could variously be masts, flagpoles, antennas. The containers have three narrow slits for windows, as also a stairway from ground level to the top, the report said.

According to experts a data centre on a barge made good sense, given the easy access to a source of cooling, and also an inexpensive source of power -- the sea.

The report quoted Stanford research fellow Jonathan Koomey as saying putting data centres inside shipping containers was a well-established practice, with companies like Dell, Hewlett-Packard, Sun Microsystems, and Microsoft installing specially built data centres in shipping containers for some time now, considering their ease of deployment.

Google remains non-committal about the current status of the project saying, ''We file patent applications on a variety of ideas that our employees come up with. Some of those ideas later mature into real products, services or infrastructure, some don't. We do a lot to make our infrastructure scalable and cost efficient, but at this time we have nothing to announce regarding this specific technology.''

The floating data centre described in the patent could theoretically meet the internet search giant's needs for stable, secure and sustainable power for its servers, with the floating computers capturing wave energy for clean power and using the ocean as a heat sink by using sea water to keep the servers cool.

Meanwhile, the UK's The Register points out while there could be a potential problem in shuttling data in and out of the ''floating byte bucket'', the world-spanning fibre-optic cable that Google owned could come in handy to address the issue.

It added that floating data centres would give Google the ability to make available large computing resources at quick notice or even allow it to ''float compute clusters around the world to lower latency for info-hungry areas.''