Peter Christy

Networks Heat Up

A notable year in high-performance networking has turned a technical conference into a very relevant discussion of important commercial issues. Stanford's 16th Hot Interconnects Symposium (formally an IEEE meeting -- 27/8 August) has what looks like some remarkably interesting discussions including a keynote and two panels on Wall Street networking, a talk by Mendel Rosenblum on Virtualization and Data Center Networking, and a keynote and technical papers on how to deal with all the cores in tomorrow's multicore CPU's (see http://www.hoti.org/hoti16/program/ ). 2008 is the year when 10G networking started to be competitive, virtualization swept the data center, multicore impact started to be felt in earnest, and when the importance of computational intensive finance became all too clear. Even if the technology of on-chip optical interconnect isn't what lights your personal fire, you might very well find something important at this Stanford meeting.

Power to the People!

The power minimization emphasis continued at Intel's IDF (which otherwise suffered from a pall of the recent 10,000 announced layoffs).  In Paul Otellini's keynote (speaking of hotseats!), Google's distinguished engineer Luiz Barroso spoke a little about Google's power reduction goals. One of his most interesting observations was that in a normal data center, 70% of the power is consumed before even getting to the computing equipment because of the various conversions (AC/DC/AC) and voltage step-downs. So if you make a server 50% more power efficient you make a 15% improvement overall. If you want to really save on products you have to consider a much bigger picture. Google also makes its own server power supplies with considerably greater efficiency than those on the open market (see http://services.google.com/blog_resources/PSU_white_paper.pdf ). We suppose that next GM will introduce a laptop that runs on G85 ethanol (with Corvette design).

The Power of Power

As you should remember we've been talking about the importance of electrical power for some time and we're happy to note that the WSJ has finally caught up with a fascinating article about the BIG hosters (Google, Yahoo and Microsoft) all building ENORMOUS data centers on the Columbia River near the big hydroelectric dams.  There is a wonderful subtext since the reason these locations are so attractive is the inability of those power suppliers to charge fair market rates (we always thought electricity was a fungible commodity but guess not in the eyes of our Government!). Anyway it all shows the extreme importance of power (and cooling) in these applications. Ironically last week in his newsletter, Bruce Schneier announced the winner to his terrorist movie plot contest. The winning plot centered around destroying the Grand Cooley Dam (of Woody Guthrie fame) in which case the 40 mile lake in back of it comes roaring down the Columbia destroying all the other dams (and now I guess data centers) in its path, creating total economic chaos in the Western parts of the US. Could this really be coincidence?