Posts by Alan Brown

Re: "gigawatts" capacity ?

"I've wanted a faster CPU for years now, but progress seems slow"

Over the last 15 years computers have pretty much stayed at the same speed but power consumption has dropped 80-90%

It was about that long that serial DDR2 ram (remember that and the Rambus licensing fiasco?) drew 11W per 2GB and the processors in the Dual CPU Supermicro X8 motherboard that 24 of them were loaded into drew another 300W - not much less at idle - for a total power consumption of over 700W

Now I can do 64GB and 3 times as much same compute power (22 vs 8 cores) in less than 100W at full song, down to less than 50W when idling. The 64TB HDD array pulls more power than that, which is a good incentive to ditch spinning media for SSD (or at least buy larger capacity drives even if they pull about the same power)

Re: "gigawatts" capacity ?

You're falling into the same trap that caused my manager to doubt my calculations so much that he went behind my back, revising power and cooling requirements for our small datacentre downwards to what he thought was "reasonable"

The end result was a server room that couldn't take the thermal load of the equipment that was supposed to be housed in it even before it was handed over and cost an extra £700k sorting it out (which somehow became all my fault, go figure)

Thankfully I no longer work there and it took them several years to replace me - at double the salary I was on.

Re: Are you sure obtaining power is cheap?

Grids are straining, generation is straining and local power distributors are straining (most street distribution was based on 400W to 1kW rolling average load per house depending on when it was installed. Adding heat pumps, EV charging and all the rest will push that well past exploding footpath territory(*) in short order even if battery powerwalls become the norm - and NO, most houses won't come close to balancing their consumption with solar panels on the roof)

(*) London's exploding footpaths are mostly overloaded distribution cables finally letting go

Let's hope that the government don't take a page from Brazil (the movie) and blame the creaky infrastructure's increasingly violent and more frequent failures on "terorrists"

There's a whole lotta spending coming and the fixation with renewables instead of nuclear is forcing massive redundant capacity to be overlaid to deal with rapidly changing flows instead of concentrating on getting ahead of the curve instead of simply playing catchup to "matching electrical generation" (We're going to need 4-6 times as much generation capacity (annualised TWh, not peak power) in most western countries and bringing developing countries up to speed will need even more investment, or else their increase in carbon emissions will vastly outweigh our reductions

I suspect minds will be strongly focussed once the Laptev Sea methane clathrate deposits blow out (it's already locked in, merely a matter of when) but if that kicks off a chain reaction then we can collectively put our heads between our legs and kiss our asses goodbye - humans can't survive in a planetary atmosphere reduced to 12% oxygen and nor can most other complex life (including virtually everything warm blooded).

Permian extinction V2.0 would be just as bad now as the first time around.

Re: Another Interpretation?

I can see Nvidia et al deciding they'd rather be headquartered somewhere else, just like AMSL is working on eliminating the last USA-sourced components from their optical rigs

Re: One hour of nvidia 600kW

That depends if you can get the whole thing up to 88mph in less than a parking lot's length

Re: curious to see how they arrange it so that WFH boosts "a sense of community"

"if they like mirroring you by trying to sit on the laptop"

The one of mine that did it the most liked the warmth. Solved by giving her a real (older) laptop to sleep on

Re: Communication is important

This is why fuel gauges and monitoring them matters

I've seen the opposite problem. The smell of 1000 litres of spilled diesel that's soaked into the ground takes a while to go away

Re: Recipe for disaster

There are two kinds of people:

Morning people

Those who want to kill Morning People

Re: Ditto

I had the same experience in my last job.

By all accounts things were "difficult" for them after I left, compounded by them taking more than 2 years to find a replacement "me" (and as I understand it, the replacements quitting after only a few months)

Re: Ditto

"and one poor guy pulling overtime (like they all did) "

And still do. Manglement always prioritise saving money (ie: not hiring people) over safety unless and until held personally accountable for decisions that have life-changing consequences

Even then they usually get away with tossing the unfortunate pleb under a passing Clapham Omnibus rather than admit they bear ultimate responsibility

It seems odd, given the telco culture of massive system redundancies

The telco I worked for never allowed critical hardware updates to be done solo, which meant you had someone along to make the tea whilst you worked

Re: Hilarious

"she used the heel of her hand to select a button."

Which to be honest is ergonomically better than using fingers

Re: What the heck kind of mouse... thick lenses

Sharp.... or hot

Re: Confused Mouse

That's on par with the old wheeze of taping the hookswitch down on someone's phone and then calling them

I once observed someone smash the phone during this prank - because it wouldn't stop ringing after he picked up the handset

Re: Yes, come to France!

They integrated so well that they had a german-only political party in the USA - The German-American Bund

That party even had a gathering at Madison Square Gardens one evening in 1939, it's on Youtube as "A Night at the Gardens" and is worth looking up for the speeches

Re: American Technology

There's the small issue of Puerto Rico and the Pacific territories to consider

It would indeed be highly ironic if Trump's posturing forced the USA to recognise PR as state #51

Re: The UK should be paying attention

The sad fact for Britain is that thanks to US influence, all the political parties start at Thatcherism and move right from there

Meantime a guy whose policies were pretty much equivalent to Ted Heath's gets slammed as unelectable communism

Re: Easy...

NOTHING that humans can do will affect large volcanoes one way or the other. The energies involved are far more than we can bring to bear (even a large nuke would only trigger an eruption if it was on the brink of blowing anyway)

Rest easy on that score. If it blows up it won't be because we caused it

Re: Easy...

So are arbitragers, due to the midpoint between North American and European bourses

Re: risk of contamination that said fracking involves. Neither of which are an issue here

The problem with fracking is that it's expensive and when you do it for gas, what results is essentially a puff of vapour that doesn't last long

The USA "solved" this by exempting gas fracking operations from environmental requirements like requiring well liners to prevent aquifer cross-contamination and treating the fracking water before discharging it. To be honest the earth temblers are annoying but trivial - they're the absolute least of the problems caused by the American mindset (Living in Surrey UK it's been interesting to observe how ALL earth tremors have been blamed on oil fracking, when the quakes are much deeper in origin and more widely felt than can be explained by fracking activities. People tend to forget that even in a midplate area the crust is constantly moving/creeping and ground levels can easily heave by 50 feet or more just due to aquifer groundwater removal (eg: California Central Valley)

Geothermal fracking of the Eden Project sort is done at very deep levels and shouldn't result in earthquakes, however the mere fact of pumping down fluids and then having them percolate back up means they come back with whatever managed to dissolve into that fluid. This is usually toxic (eg: Arsenic and sulphuric acids at Wairakei)

We are jumping through a lot of very expensive hoops in order to avoid using nuclear power and whilst I understand the objections to water-moderated systems, they're still safer than every other form of energy generation and there ARE other safer technologies which are immune by design to every kind of covil nuclear accident we've seen (this was tested in 1965-69), but the problem with them is that anything which doesn't require enriched uranium essentially buggers the nuclear weapons industry(*) so cold warrior mentalities have (rather forcefully) kept them on the shelf until recently

The cold hard fact is that no matter how much magic pixie dust or ground up unicorn you apply to the equation, NONE of the renewables can bridge the gap between "approximately matching existing electricity generation capacity"(**) and the increase in capacity needed to fully decarbonise. The only way to bridge that gap is with nuclear power - If China's work on TMSR-LF1 pays off (it's a rebuild of the Oak Ridge work) then nuclear is suddenly 80% cheaper to build/maintain - which undercuts EVERYTHING and produces less than 1% of the waste currently being generated - PLUS is makes rare earth mining economic worldwide by providing a market for the single greatest waste product of that mining - thorium(+)

(*) Nobody is making U235 bombs. At around $16billion worth of materials apiece even today, it's cheaper to buy your enemy. Depleted uranium is neutron-bombarded to make weapons-grade plutonium and THAT is made into weapons. All the fuss about "uranium enrichment" is a three-cup-monty game to distract people from where the dangers really are (Yes, U235 implosion weapons were found to reduce the volume required by 90% but that still leaves a "fat man" size bomb which is hard to put on the end of a cruise missile and it's still cheaper to make plutonium weapons, which is why only 3 were tested before the designs were permanently shelved)

(**) In Britain that will require paving every rooftop with solar panels and planting forests of wind turbines with no regard to safety spacing from populated areas, both on land and in shallow waters, also requiring massive overbuilding of the electrical grid to handle massive decentralised generation and instantaneous large energy flow direction changes - something that would cost vastly more than 65-70 nuclear power plants

(+) China didn't corner the rare earth markets by having laxer environmental standards for their mines than rest-of-world. They did so by buying the thorium output of those mines over the last 25 years in anticipation of their nuclear power research paying off. That turned an expensive remediation problem into an income stream for the mine operators and kept them in business

Re: risk of contamination that said fracking involves. Neither of which are an issue here

"Plus how long it'll take before useful heat is extracted from an area, and the rock has cooled to a point where the project becomes non-viable."

This is a big point that Geothermal advocates like to handwave away.

Rock is a VERY GOOD INSULATOR and with a few exceptions on top of magma chambers (eg: Iceland), the maximum extracted power of geothermal plants happens in the first year, with energy extraction tending to taper off relatively rapidly (a bit like fracked gas wells produce a lot of gas for a short period but dry up quickly, so to be a going concern you need to be constantly drilling new holes)

The other problem with geothermal is the same one with water-moderated nuclear power: It isn't hot enough

What I mean by that is that the fluid is only at about 350C or thereabouts - which is only hot enough to produce "wet" steam. Such steam will condense and form droplets in steam turbines which in turn cause major wear on the blades and subsequent very high engineering costs to maintaine them (lots of downtime, expensive parts, etc)

What's needed is dry or supercritical steam at 650C or higher. This makes for vastly more efficient energy conversion (greater delta-T along the turbine) as well as reducing impact wear on the blades to essentially zero

Regarding the cross-contamination of aquifers - yes, this is a very real concern and one addressed by using sealed well liners. One of the big USA problems is that they aren't required and that's why they have so many more issues than in other areas

Even WITHOUT fracking, geothermal extraction is rather fraught and risky for the immediate vicinity. New Zealand's Wairaki field drilling caused geothermal eruptions to pop up in a number of areas outside the exploration area - most notably "The Craters of the Moon" - That particular operation IS on top of an active magma chamber but still suffered a massive drop in output over time (only mitigated by drilling more holes) so even being on top of a "moving" heat source is no guarantee of long-term viability - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wairakei_Power_Station

I've seen geothermal advocates try and push for deeper holes but nothing solves the temperature and longevity issues. If you get to depths that are hot enough you're going to have lava coming up the drill holes - as has happened in Iceland

Re: What's the next boondoggle?

"France is at 22 minutes of power"

Not quite. The plasma has been maintained for 22 minutes, that's not the same as being over unity end to end (It's still impressive but practical Fusion is still as far off as it's ever been and those neutrons are problematic)

Re: One step beyond...

You have a Facebook account whether you opened one or not. We established that happens over a decade ago

It's not so much opening one as claiming the profile that they already have on you

Every QLC drive I've looked at already uses this strategy internally

The only thing keeping SSD pricing high at the moment is AI demand. Everyone says "bubble" and I hope they're right as this will bring things down to more reasonable rates (ie: in line with the density increase/cost decrease curve we all know and love)

China's bringing SHITLOADS of NAND memory production online. It doesn't need cutting edge fabs and the end result is that NAND is turning into bulk commodity product

Re: And while they are at it, start using dual actuator tech

To be blunt, dual actuator is a problem looking for a solution. It adds complexity and power consumption whilst not addressing the fundamental limitations of HDDs in a meaningful way

By the time you factor in power consumption and endurance, QLC may end up being CHEAPER than HDDs. HAMR is a decade behind schedule and HDD densities are not increasing at anything near the rates for SSD

I'm sure Meta is getting its HDDs at a steep discount, but bit barns are increasingly the only niche large consumer of HDDs and sooner or later they won't be economic anymore. The question is whether bit barns dump HDDs first or HDD makers decide to get out of the racket

Re: Not a very bright boy...

Think being the operative word

You'd know that if you've ever had to interact with Eaton software