11–20 of 52 posts
So, I was going to ask everyone to speculate on what kind of petaflop workloads NSA might use, but a quick scan of Cray's site shows that Cray has a Hadoop appliance product as well as an interesting "big data graph appliance" [1] that "discover[s] unknown and hidden relationships."
"Backup generators have failed numerous tests, according to project documents,
and officials disagree about whether the cause is understood."
Generators aren't store and forget machines, as we've learned a few years back. When Hurricane Sandy hit, we had an extra generator truck available just in case ours wouldn't kick in. This is a very real possibility with generators since, just like a vehicle that runs on fuel and needs oil, if it's not used, it will rot (so to speak) and likely won't start when you really, really, really need it.
I suspect a combination of the savage Utah Sun coupled with freezing temps at night have done these in. Plus, I wonder how long they were in storage and shipping before actually getting installed.
Now that's just the generators. The rest of this mess reads like a poorly thought out wouldn't it be awesome project some high ranking folks at No Such Agency envisaged and a bunch of contractors happily obliged... care be damned as long as profits were made.
Look at how incompetant he is. He couldn't possibly be a threat to us. We can rest assured that any information he may (or may not) be collecting (we can neither confirm nor deny) is assuredly badly disorganized, and certainly won't be misused.
Let's all simply ignore him and go about our lives as if he didn't exist.
Reminiscent of "why do our centrifuges keep tearing themselves apart?"
I've also seen my fair share of mis-matched power provisioning and loading, it can be very hard on the equipment. When I did a quick look at a bitcoin mining setup with 700 GPUs I was pretty impressed at how big a swing they had in terms of power consumption. At NSA scale something like that would be really really impressive and real pain to get right.
Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain. He is powerless and inconsequential, we swear. Look at how incompetant he is. He couldn't possibly be a threat to us. We can rest assured that any information he may (or may not) be collecting (we can neither confirm nor deny) is assuredly badly disorganized, and certainly won't be misused. Let's all simply ignore him and go about our lives as if he didn't exist.
— Sun Tzu, The Art of War
It is possibly 100% or high 90s.
And probably a no-bid contract since only a few suppliers would be trusted enough in the first place.
I always though the best way to take a datacenter offline would be though disabling its cooling system but I guess power is a good approach too.
Reminiscent of "why do our centrifuges keep tearing themselves apart?"
That was the first thing that came to my mind too. Having been inside some really big data centers and seen a bunch of Siemans gear that only worked with Windows XP controller software for monitoring. Generally not as mission critical though as the stuff used in Natanz. I've also seen my fair share of mis-matched power provisioning and loading, it can be very hard on the equipment. When I did a quick look at a bitcoi…
The first, and only, thing that should come to your mind is that this is a boondoggle.[1]
Terrorism and the NSA and privacy are nothing but a smokescreen to hide an enormous transfer of wealth.
Make no mistake: the only thing that could possibly be better news (to the stakeholders)[2] than this project being completed is if the project was completed and it burnt to the ground the very next day ... and they got to build it again.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boondoggle
[2] You are not a stakeholder
It's probably not a stretch to say throwing monkey wrenches at the Bluffdale data center would be as strategic to some super-powers as Stuxnet was to the US. 65 megawatts is a lot of power, but not being able to root-cause problems after 50,000 hours of testing, really?
I guess never attribute to malice what is merely incompetence. This is a government contract after all. Maybe the only thing that would be more surprising than not being able to power up the data center would be if they actually built it without a hitch!
Earlier quoted context omitted.
That was the first thing that came to my mind too. Having been inside some really big data centers and seen a bunch of Siemans gear that only worked with Windows XP controller software for monitoring. Generally not as mission critical though as the stuff used in Natanz. I've also seen my fair share of mis-matched power provisioning and loading, it can be very hard on the equipment. When I did a quick look at a bitcoi…
"That was the first thing that came to my mind too." The first, and only, thing that should come to your mind is that this is a boondoggle.[1] Terrorism and the NSA and privacy are nothing but a smokescreen to hide an enormous transfer of wealth. Make no mistake: the only thing that could possibly be better news (to the stakeholders)[2] than this project being completed is if the project was completed and it burnt to…