My First Brain

The boxless Supercomputer

Why do server farms always have this weird look of being a warehouse? A bunch of white boxes stacked on shelves in very cold rooms. Why don’t they look like giant electronic brains?

Heh..

Ok…so what I believe should change next is the layout of computers in giant server farms. There should be no cases. A minimal number of pieces are actually needed to run each machine.

- Mainboard (includes CPU, RAM)
- Harddrives

That’s it.

What you say? Well…remember folks, a server farm. A computing center. Anyone read recently about the recent Google supercomputer location in the Northwest? The only purpose of these computers is to process. No entertainment needed.

So, no data readers are necessary – CD/DVD Roms, Floppy, alternative readers (its all on the network). No power supply is needed because the building has to get electricity down there somehow and I am sure a bit of intelligence could move the PSU far away to another room. Sound card? Video Card? What? Huh? Who cares what these computers have to scream or show to you.

And you could probably subdivide the two groups of hardware even further into their own special containment units (which of course you design to give easy access and identification). The differences between cooling harddrives and cooling processors are significant enough that intelligent process could be built and really smarten things up.

Water cooling is an interesting thing we do these days. Imagine that Google data center on the water there have a pipe coming from that cold river into the warehouse and running into smaller thinner fast moving ultra-cold (but just right to keep ice from forming) mini-tubes which would then be routed to run directly over the heads of the individual processors for purpose of cooling. With ingenuity, something like this could remove the needs for fans and electricity further…

And then at the end of the day, all we really have are a few components arranged in a continuing exact pattern going off into forever, as if an impossible Escher drawing. It would oddly begin to look like a giant brain (where each computer node would represent a single neuron). How many brain cells are there?

Goodnight…