Never underestimate the bandwidth of a barge filled with hard drives.
Is Google building a hulking floating data center in SF Bay?
141–150 of 250 posts
Re: Is Google building a hulking floating data center in SF Bay?
#142Can somebody explain the point behind the secrecy? What does Google have to gain by taking all these steps to hide they're the ones building it?
> Can somebody explain the point behind the secrecy? What does Google have to gain by taking all these steps to hide they're the ones building it?
It's too big to hide the fact that someone is doing something, so by making obvious efforts to keep it secret, they prompt people to look into it, find clues that its tied back to Google, and give more press to the effort than it would have gotten if Google had issued a press release about building floating data centers.
Re: Is Google building a hulking floating data center in SF Bay?
#143Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah, that's why I was trying to figure out how they would power it. Diesel generators seem... unGoogley.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ocean_thermal_energy_conversion Not enough depth in the Bay for OTEC, though. (You need a bigger temperature gradient)
Building it in on an island in the Bay doesn't mean you plan to operate it in the Bay.
Re: Is Google building a hulking floating data center in SF Bay?
#144The middle of the ocean could be a a very high margin location for IaaS hosting. Due to speed-of-light delays, some of the ideal locations for hosting high-speed trading arbitrages are in the middle of the ocean. Being half way between two exchanges would allow you to notice a small difference in price of some commodity in two different exchanges and buy and sell microseconds before your competitors on the mainland k…
If this actually worked, there would be boats sitting in the middle of the Atlantic and Pacific with computers on them. I have no idea if they are sitting there, but I'm pretty sure if it was an idea that worked, it would be done by now.
From talking with a friend who's a retired stat arb quant, the fundamental idea is sound.
My guess for why people aren't doing it yet is that first, there are still untapped locations on land that are easier to get running (example: the Chicago to NY fiber run), and second getting the data to the ocean point isn't trivial.
I think if you want to look for early signaling of someone doing this, look for where telco folks route new fiber runs. If they take a longer path to go near one of the points in the paper I'd bet they're at least hedging for the possibility of using that fiber run for arbitrage.
Edit: a more mundane explanation may be that the arbitrage is so low margin that the payback time isn't practical vs the initial investment.
Re: Is Google building a hulking floating data center in SF Bay?
#145Earlier quoted context omitted.
I guess they'd better make the first one not too ambitious and ramp up later.
It's still in beta.
So it'll get deployed, a bunch of people and startups will come to rely on it, then the guy who's driving this as his "20% project" will get moved to another group, and it'll sit un-maintained for several years slowly rotting, then sink without a trace…
Re: Is Google building a hulking floating data center in SF Bay?
#146So it appears as though Google is looking towards a future where they are an independent country, or at the very least free from regulation, visa-a-vis Seasteading. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seasteading
And interestingly, Patri Friedman used to work at Google...
Patri only worked on prediction markets at google, so far as I know, and left to spend more time on Seasteading and related projects.
Source: he's a friend of a family member.
Re: Is Google building a hulking floating data center in SF Bay?
#147A massive floating data-centre out in international waters would be a pretty powerful protection against governmental interference in your business. Well, except for the military kind.
Yeah that last part of your thought is the only important one. Nobody, _nobody_ has better undersea cabling tapping abilities than the NSA.
Re: Is Google building a hulking floating data center in SF Bay?
#148Very interesting... Any chance that this will mean the Govt can't subpoena data from this data center if it is floating far enough from the US coast? Or does it not matter because clearly the US will be the closest harbor?
Don't know how this'd work in actual international waters, but no, this is in a bay, nothing international about it.
Re: Is Google building a hulking floating data center in SF Bay?
#149International waters, immune to NSA?
Also, does wave power really yield sufficient energy?
Re: Is Google building a hulking floating data center in SF Bay?
#150Earlier quoted context omitted.
but how do you confirm the validity of the reports
There are two types of reports, fraudulent ones and real ones. The fraudulent ones will come from everywhere, while the real reports come only from pirate infested harbors. Therefore just subtract the mean report density and what remains should be random fluctuations around zero plus the real reports. So if a harbor has more than some threshold of reports, then it is pirate invested.
At this point in the discussion, you could probably correlate it with the number of the letters "R" in the reports. Because we all know that it's the pirates' favorite letter.