In depth report, Solar Farm goes live in Mohave Desert

GigaOm’s Katie Fehrenbacher reports on the ribbon cutting of the Solar farm in Mohave desert.

The Hoover Dam of solar is now live in the desert of California & why it’s so important

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43 MINS AGO

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A look at the heliostats and 2 of the 3 towers of Ivanpah. Taken from the 6th floor of the Unit 1 tower.
SUMMARY:

The revolutionary solar farm in the Mojave desert is finally live. Here’s the story behind the tech, and an inside look at the launch.

Google is one of the backers of the project.

Google even put in $168 million in 2o11. Google says it’s both interested in the financial return that a 25-year power contract can deliver, and also that it’s interested in backing clean power for its data centers both directly and indirectly.

The solar mirrors at Ivanpah spell out the word Google, a backer of the project.

The solar mirrors at Ivanpah spell out the word Google, a backer of the project. A view from the 6th floor of tower Unit 1.

 

Disclusure; i do some work for GigaOm Research and know Katie.

And Utah Follows Maryland's lead to Halt Water to NSA Data Center

I wrote yesterday that Maryland has a proposal to cut off water and electricity to the NSA data center.

And now a Utah Legislator is proposing to cut off water to the NSA data center.

Utah legislator to propose halting water to NSA data center
Legislation » The bill also would prohibit universities from partnering with NSA.

By Nate Carlisle

| The Salt Lake Tribune

 
First Published 5 hours ago • Updated 16 minutes ago

A state representative wants to shut down the National Security Agency’s Utah Data Center by shutting off their water, but has not yet filed a bill that he acknowledges has little chance of passing.

Rep. Marc Roberts, R-Santaquin, has entered what is called a boxcar bill labeled "Prohibition on Electronic Data Collection Assistance." The bill had not been formally filed as of late Wednesday, and no draft had been posted online.

And not only is Utah thinking of cutting off water it is cutting off access to the local university.

The bill would do more than shut off water to the Utah Data Center, which needs the water to cool the massive facility in Bluffdale. Mike Maharrey, the national communications director at the Tenth Amendment Center, said he has seen a draft of the bill and it would also prevent Utah’s public universities from partnering with the NSA and prohibit businesses from receiving state contracts if they also do business with the NSA.

The universities provision would impact the University of Utah, which for years has received NSA grants to conduct mathematics research and recently created, at the NSA’s request, a course teaching data center management.

If the NSA thought a PR problem was bad, running a data center without water is impossible.

Dudes (and Gals) Why Would Google be design Server Silicon? The Silicon for High Performance Clusters makes more sense

EETimes has an article quoting John Doerr that Google has chip designers.

Google Ramps Up Chip Design

 
 
2/12/2014 02:08 PM EST 
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SAN FRANCISCO — Google appears to be ramping up a broad and deep effort in developing its own chips. Just what it is designing is still unclear.

At a panel at the International Solid-State Circuits Conference(ISSCC), veteran venture capitalist John Doerr said, "at some point in time Facebook will work on proprietary silicon, I know for a fact Google is."

The same day, another veteran chip designer at ISSCC told EE Times he knows at least two or three circuit designers Google has hired over the last year or so.

A key engineer behind the Hewlett-Packard Moonshoot server moved to Google six months ago. Partha Ranganathan "is currently at Google designing their next-generation systems," according tohis website. He worked at HP on systems that can accommodate a wide range of Xeon, Atom, and ARM processors.

Would Google be designing their own server chips?  The media is all excited Google would develop ARM servers.  How much better can Google make a two proc server run?

What makes way more sense is Google designing silicon for a high performance fabric that works across 100s/1000s of servers or maybe even 10,000/100,000 servers.  If you look at Partha’s resume you can see he has the background for disaggregation systems and systems that scale.  Like a super computer system.

Another way to Look at Open Compute Project, a Massive Open Online Course

Economist has a post on Higher Education being disrupted by Massive Open Online Courses.  There are only a few of us in the data center industry who think about this if they are facing their kids path in higher education.  What is closer to what we encounter is why go to a data center conference?  The more experienced find there is little to learn at a conference and it is not worth thousands of registration fee and T&E to go to a conference.

Massive open online forces

The rise of online instruction will upend the economics of higher education

Feb 8th 2014 | From the print edition

UNIVERSITIES have not changed much since students first gathered in Oxford and Bologna in the 11th century. Teaching has been constrained by technology. Until recently a student needed to be in a lecture hall to hear the professor or around a table to debate with fellow students. Innovation is eliminating those constraints, however, and bringing sweeping change to higher education.

 

A senior analyst for one of the highly respected IT advisory companies once went to Open Compute Summit and late at night after a few drinks he was talking to Frank Frankovsky and told Frank he should charge to attend the OCP Summits.  He said that his company charges thousands to attend yet there is more useful content from OCP than his company’s events.  I’ve been to both and I would agree I would pay for OCP before his company’s events.

OCP has taken a leadership position to be free to attend and content is free to use.  What other data center event can you go to that has free attendance and free to get to the content, including no registration.This is drawing in users and knowledge from the people who have good things to say yet don’t have the marketing budget to sponsor events or the experience to get their talk in as a presentation.

Any one can find flaws in OCP, and those flaws are exposed to all to see and make comments.  That’s part of being Open.  What data center conference do you attend where you feel like you can freely express your opinion?

OCP’s success is coming at the expense of other data center events that can’t compete against free and open.  With 3,500 registered attendees, 2,400 or more who showed up, and thousands watching the live stream it is a force of change.  Companies who want to reach the OCP audience of scale-out data center infrastructure, hardware, and software continue to support the event.

Media coverage of OCP beats most data center events.  I honestly can’t say what data center event consistently has media coverage better than OCP.

Darn No Data Center Planned for Moffett Field Hangar One, Home for Aerospace and Robotics

I joked that Moffett Field’s Hangar One infrastructure could be an interesting place for Google server racks in a data center.  Turns out the Mercury News has got Google saying they will use Hangar One for Aerospace and Robotics.

Google plans aerospace and robotics projects for Hangar One

By Brandon Bailey

bbailey@mercurynews.com

 

POSTED:   02/11/2014 05:51:30 PM PST | UPDATED:   94 MIN. AGO

 

Scaffolding is set up inside the north end of Hangar One at Moffett Field in Mountain View on Wednesday, June 6, 2012.
Scaffolding is set up inside the north end of Hangar One at Moffett Field in Mountain View on Wednesday, June 6, 2012. (Kirstina Sangsahachart/Palo Alto Daily News)
 

MOUNTAIN VIEW -- If you were Google, what would you do with a 350,000-square-foot hangar that was originally built to house helium airships for the U.S. Navy?

How about using its cavernous interior for building and testing new robots, planetary rovers and other space or aviation technology?