Google is known as a fertile ground for hatching and developing ideas, and a recently published patent application demonstrates the kinds of corners the company encourages its people to think around. The patent in question was filed just over 18 months ago, in February 2007, and details a conceptual floating data center, cooled and powered by wave or tidal energy, and able to move from place to place depending on where its computing power is most necessary.

The abstract of Google's patent refers to a system including "a floating platform-mounted computer data center comprising a plurality of computing units, a sea-based electrical generator in electrical connection with the plurality of computing units, and one or more sea-water cooling units for providing cooling to the plurality of computing units."

Consult the image below, and you can see four rectangular modules (Google's term), all of which are capable of being moved by crane. Google already has a patent on modular, mobile computing data centers that can be networked together to form a greater whole, although Sun could potentially challenge it. Sun's Modular Datacenter (formerly known as BlackBox) was on the market before Google's patent was approved, but the two companies could settle the issue—if one is ever raised—through any number of licensing or cross-licensing agreements.

Google discusses the potential need for this type of portable data center, and describes uses that include:

A temporary need for additional mobile computing power due to a major function or gathering

The use of a mobile data center as a primary communications node after a natural disaster, or in any scenario where lines of communication and Internet availability have been compromised

A means of moving data centers closer to users, decreasing latency, and increasing the number of connections that can be handled simultaneously at certain stress points.

Google's patent filing largely deals with ship-based data centers, but it also addresses the use of wave power, tidal power, and seawater for providing electricity and cooling to land-based data centers that are close enough to water to make such concepts feasible. If there's a flaw in Google's plan, it's that it relies upon an as-yet unproven method of energy production. Tidal power certainly shows promise, and there are a number of functional prototypes and development projects worldwide, but these efforts have only produced a single commercial-scale prototype thus far, off the coast of Northern Ireland. The ocean-driven generator, named SeaGen, came online in April 2008, and fed 150kW into the electrical grid for the first time on July 17. Once fully functional, SeaGen should provide 1.2MW of total power.

There's nothing to stop Google from deploying an ocean-going data center powered by conventional fuel sources, but such a vessel could easily be limited by range or fuel capacity. In addition to its own fuel, the data-ship would be forced to carry enough diesel to power its systems. Fuel costs could prove prohibitively expensive, especially if the ship was needed in an area where infrastructure no longer existed (or had never existed) to provide the vessel with a chance to refill both its primary tanks and its generator storage.

With challenges like these to overcome, it'll be a few more years before we read tales of the S.S. I'm Feeling Lucky and her epic struggle to round the cape, but Google seems to think the hurdles to wave and tidal power generation are close enough to resolution to make the patent worth filing.