For almost a week now, the internet’s been trawling the depths of its imagination trying to figure out what the heck Google is doing building barges. Obscure patent documents suggest they’re floating data centers. Local reporters think they’re clandestine Google Glass stores. But nobody really has a clue.
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The Google mystery barges docked near San Francisco and Portland, Maine are getting even more mysterious. We’ve seen the barge and heard the arguments about what’s inside
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After an odd but engrossing CNET story last week, everybody’s wondering what the strange barge with ties to Google is doing docked near San Francisco. At first, it looked like the 25-foot-long structure was a next generation data center in-the-making, but CBS and CNET sources now say it’s a floating Google Glass store. Weird huh?
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Cnet reports that Google is building something super secret—and super huge—on a barge that’s floating in the San Francisco Bay. What the hell is this thing?
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Seattle is considering the idea of using waste heat from data centers to heat itself, funnelling energy from gigantic server rooms into a new district heating system to keep people warm.
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This is embarrassingly funny. The WSJ reports that the NSA’s new Utah data center has suffered 10 meltdowns in the past 13 months because of electrical surges. The NSA is basically using so much power in its spying efforts that it is poetically killing its data centers. Seriously, the surges have destroyed hundreds of thousands of dollars in machinery.
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The Internet is an ethereal thing. It’s everywhere and nowhere at the same time. Sure, it’s “on” your computer (or your phone), but it came from somewhere, and this art installation shows you where. Exactly. More »
Google’s thrown open the doors to its data centers, publishing a whole site dedicated to photos inside the otherwise secretive locations, adding Street View to the center in Lenoir, NC, and allowing Wired on site for a lengthy feature. More »
Researchers from Microsoft and Cornell University want to remove the tangles of cables from data centers. It’s no small feat. With thousands of machines that need every bit of bandwidth available WiFi certainly isn’t an option. To solve the issue, scientists are turning to two sources: the cutting edge of 60GHz networking and the 19th century mathematical theories of Arthur Cayley. Cayley’s 1889 paper, On the Theory of Groups, was used to guide their method for connecting servers in the most efficient and fault tolerant way possible. The findings will be presented in a paper later this month, but it won’t be clear how effectively this research can be applied to an actual data center until someone funds a prototype. The proposed Cayley data centers would rely on cylindrical server racks that have transceivers both inside and outside the tubes of machines, allowing them to pass data both among and between racks with (hopefully) minimal interference. Since the new design would do away with traditional network switches and cables, researchers believe they may eventually cost less than current designs and will draw less power. And will do so while still streaming data at 10 gigabits per second — far faster than WiGig, which also makes use of 60GHz spectrum. To read the paper in its entirety check out the source.
Filed under: Wireless, Networking, Science, Alt, Microsoft
Researchers turn to 19th century math for wireless data center breakthrough originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 12 Oct 2012 11:39:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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On the Feasibility of Completely Wireless Datacenters (PDF) | Email this | Comments
There is a lot of data out there, and more is being created every day. It takes a lot of resources to keep it around, and make sure that you and everyone else can access what they want, when they want, with minimal downtime. Naturally this takes a lot of energy, but the New York Times looked into exactly how much. It’s a ridiculous amount. More »
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