Reblog > Power, Pollution and the Internet

By Friday, January 23, 2015 Resources, Sciences & Technology, Society, X-Posts Tags: 0089, A, Conditioning, Datacenter, Energy, Infrastructure Permalink 0

Via The New York Times (via Computed·By)

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SANTA CLARA, Calif. — Jeff Rothschild’s machines at Facebook had a problem he knew he had to solve immediately. They were about to melt.

 

The company had been packing a 40-by-60-foot rental space here with racks of computer servers that were needed to store and process information from members’ accounts. The electricity pouring into the computers was overheating Ethernet sockets and other crucial components.

Thinking fast, Mr. Rothschild, the company’s engineering chief, took some employees on an expedition to buy every fan they could find — “We cleaned out all of the Walgreens in the area,” he said — to blast cool air at the equipment and prevent the Web site from going down.

That was in early 2006, when Facebook had a quaint 10 million or so users and the one main server site. Today, the information generated by nearly one billion people requires outsize versions of these facilities, called data centers, with rows and rows of servers spread over hundreds of thousands of square feet, and all with industrial cooling systems.

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Mejias, U. A. (2013). Off the Network, The University of Minnesota Press.

By Friday, January 23, 2015 Resources, Sciences & Technology, Society, Thinking, X-Posts Tags: 0088, ABCD, Books, Data, Internet, Networks, Research, Thinkers Permalink 0

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Note: Off the Network, a book by Ulises Ali Mejias that is interesting to read when it comes to objectify and question the network paradigm. Beyond the praise about participation and inclusiveness that was widely used by network advocates and now also by marketing companies, Off the Network brings a critical voice and addresses the centralization, or in some other cases the “nodocentrism” that is at work through many global online services, so as the commodification of many aspects of our lives that comes with them.

While we are looking for alternative “architectures” for cloud infrastructure, nodes and services, this is a “dissonant” point of view to take into account and a book that we are integrating into the I&IC bibliography.

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A few images for a brief history (of computing) time

By Friday, January 23, 2015 Resources, Sciences & Technology, Society Tags: 0086, Computing, Hardware, History Permalink 0

Note: a aet of images I’ll need for a short introduction to the project.

From mainframe computers to cloud computing, through personal computer and all other initiatives that tried to curve “the way computers go” and provide access to tools to people who were not necessarily computer savvy. Under this perspective (“access to tools”), cloud computing is a new paradigm that takes us away from that of the personal computer. To the point that it brings us back to the time of the mainframe computer (no-access or difficult access to tools)?

If we consider how far the personal computer, combined with the more recent Internet, has changed the ways we interact, work and live, we should certainly pay attention to this new paradigm that is coming and probably work hard to make it “accessible”.

 

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A very  short history pdf in 14 images.

Reblog > Deterritorialized House – Inhabiting the data center, sketches…

By Friday, January 23, 2015 Architecture, Resources, X-Posts Tags: 0085, A, Cabinets, Computing, Data, Datacenter, Housing, Infrastructure, Interferences, Landscape, Moire_pattern, Research Permalink 0

By fabric | ch

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Along different projects we are undertaking at fabric | ch, we continue to work on self initiated researches and experiments (slowly, way too slowly… Time is of course missing). Deterritorialized House is one of them, introduced below.

 

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Moving clouds: International transportation standards

By Thursday, January 15, 2015 Resources Tags: 0082, Hardware, Infrastructure, Mobility, Standards, Variable Permalink 0
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As a technical starting point of this research Patrick Keller already wrote two posts on hardware standards and measures: The Rack Unit and the EIC /ECIA Standards (other articles including technical overview are the 19 Inch Rack & Rack Mount Cases). Within the same intent of understanding the technical standards and limitations that shape the topologies of data centers we decided to investigate how the racks can be packed, shipped, and gain mobility. The standards for server transportation safety are set by the Rack Transport Stability Team (RTST) guidelines. Of course, custom built server packaging exists based on the international standards. We’ll start by listing them from the smallest to the biggest dimensions. First off, the pallet is the smallest measure. Once installed on pallets, the racks can be disposed in standard 20′ or 40′ shipping containers. The image below depicts different ways of arranging the pallets within the container:

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Cookbook > Setting up your personal Linux & OwnCloud server

By Wednesday, December 10, 2014 Cookbooks, Resources, Sciences & Technology, X-Posts Tags: 0080, C, Clouds, Data, Datacenter, Domestic, Hardware, Infrastructure, Open source, Operating system, Personal, Software, Tools Permalink 0

Note: would you like to install your personal open source cloud infrastructure, maintain it, manage your data by yourself and possibly develop artifacts upon it, like we needed to do in the frame of this project? If the answer is yes, then here comes below the step by step recipe on how to do it. The proposed software for Cloud-like operations, ownCloud, has been chosen among different ones. We explained our (interdisciplinary) choice in this post, commented here. It is an open source system with a wide community of developers (but no designers yet).

We plan to publish later some additional Processing libraries — in connection with this open source software — that will follow one of our research project’s objectives to help gain access to (cloud based) tools.

Would you then also like to “hide” your server in a traditional 19″ Cabinet (in your everyday physical or networked vicinity)? Here is a post that details this operation and what to possibly “learn” from it –”lessons” that will become useful when it will come to possible cabinet alternatives–.

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