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Re: [ProgSoc] Project Blackbox



On Thu, 29 Nov 2007, Andrew Halliday wrote:
> Except you'll be wanting to paint them white for thermal efficiency.

 I'm guessing you mean to dissipate heat?  I always thought
 that so long as the item was shaded, the darker the colour
 the better - but a recent QI episode suggested otherwise.

 In any case, the A/C units on these things are presumably spec'd
 large enough to deal with the relatively minor heat landing on the
 outside (relative compared to the heat generated by $US500,000
 worth of Niagara / x64 kit along with 1.5 PB of disk.

> Still, I wonder what they look like on the inside...

 "Sun has looked to the future and has, we assume,
 seen that it is metal, and box-shaped."  [1]

 Though this other article [2] has a pretty picture that doesn't
 actually reveal much, other than a fascination with blue LED's
 (meh .. blue LED's are *so* 2001).


 Most interestingly (yes, I've been reading the reg a bit lately)
 was the news [3] that Google now owns the patent for this
 type of white trash data center.


> On Nov 29, 2007 1:24 PM, Liz Webb <webofillusion@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> > You'll never look at an ordinary shipping container the same way again.

 Hi Liz!

 I know this is Jonathon getting a bit too excited .. but honestly,
 I stopped looking at shipping containers the same way a few years
 ago when I first saw some photos of 'emergency houses in a box'.

 There's some amazing architecture done with these things [4]

> > Project Blackbox is a prototype of the world's first virtualised data
> > centre - built into a shipping container and optimised to deliver extreme
> > energy, space, and performance efficiencies.

 As above, Google was doing this 2 or more years ago (well, if you
 believe Cringely, and given the patent application it looks like he
 was on the money).

> > Designed to address the needs of customers who are running out of space,
> > power and cooling,

 While I'm convinced that the market is full of people who can't
 perform basic capacity management .. the truly incompetent typically
 don't have bucketloads of money (yes, notable exceptions exist).

> >    * Very High-density Computing: Capacity for over 700 CPUs, 2000 cores,
> > or 8000 compute threads!
> >    * Versatility and Flexibility: "What you want, where you want it, when
> > you want it".

 Actually, I'm curious how this will pan out -- it seems to me that
 networks will continue to get wider and cheaper -- and that it
 makes more sense to rent this capacity at some remote site, for
 as long as you need it, rather than bring it to you.  I'm presuming
 that there's a huge pipe into these boxes - but it begs the question
 of what's your average 'already at capacity' data center going to
 plug one of these things into.  It's not the kind of thing you plug
 a CAT5 into and step back.

> >    * Use innovation as a competitive advantage

 John will have something to say about this one ...  

 Jedd.



 [1]  http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/10/17/sun_data/
 [2]  http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/03/26/rackable_concentro/
 [3]  
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/10/10/google_patents_modular_data_centers/
 [4]  http://firmitas.org/

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