The dreary physical infrastructure that underpins the web, 'the real world architecture of the internet cloud' (link to an NYT piece by Tom Vanderbilt, author of How We Drive). Related, a map of all Google Data Center locations. Also, from 2006, Hiding in Plain Sight, Google Seeks More Power, the story behind the company's cheap electricity-guzzling data center in The Dalles, Oregon, also covered extensively in Harper's a couple of years later, linked via the rather specifically-targeted site Data Center Knowledge.

The NYT photographs were taken by Simon Norfolk, known for his Iraq photographs as well as his images of supercomputers (both links from BLDGBLOG). The above image is a crop of an IBM BlueGene/L installation, not a data center but a calculating machine with 'ultra-scalability for breakthrough science'.

Naturally, the key issue here is power. "You look at a typical building," Michael Manos, [then Microsoft’s general manager of data-center services] explained, "and the mechanical and electrical infrastructure is probably below 10 percent of the upfront costs. Whereas here it's 82 percent of the costs." And "the cloud, calculates [Jonathan Koomey, a scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory], consumes 1 to 2 percent of the world's electricity.'

The numbers are huge. Vanderbilt's piece quotes someone saying Microsoft has around 150,000 servers in total, with one Google site containing 45,000 servers. Yet the DCK site quotes an unconfirmed report on an under-construction Chinese data center built beneath a dam and containing in excess of 1 million servers in total.

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Other things. Photographer Michael Wolf's collection of cover illustrations of the French weekly newspaper Le Petit Journal: 'Published between 1863 and 1934, Le Petit Journal had a circulation of over one million in 1890. As Wolf says, 'the moments that the petit journal covers illustrate are a classical photojournalist's wet dream - to be in exactly the right place at the right time to catch the high point of a catastrophe or crime.'

Colossal collection of designer 'tart cards', created for the current issue of wallpaper magazine in collaboration with Type. Tart cards are a British tradition - see the X-Directory, hosted at the wonderful Irdial / Lucky Russian Trolley Ticket Cookies. Nice concept by Art Lebedev, via (Yanko) / Chest of Books hunts down open source tracts and collates them into categories / Prince Charles gets his way: Chelsea Barracks scheme scrapped (AJ, see also BBC), a controversy covered ably by Pearman a few weeks back

HTC Experiments, 'experimental practices in architectural history, theory, and criticism', and rich with interesting thoughts and theories / 50 ridiculous design rules / a short film about the Festival of Britain / The Rumpus, 'an online magazine focused on culture, as opposed to "pop culture"... Basically, we're not opposed to things that are popular, but we have no interest in “art” created by marketing executives'.

The Style Press, or bring on the marketing executives / We Can't Paint, a weblog about photography / beard crumbs, a weblog about stuff and other things / Design Kabinet, stuff blog. If one ever stopped to do a thorough semiotic analysis of the things that got posted on these websites then the list of products would make truly fascinating reading.

Labels: computers, linkage, things

posted by things at 12:05 / 1 comments