If you visit the campuses of many universities in the USA, you will find that much of their campus computing is concentrated in basements.
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If you visit the campuses of many universities in the USA, you will find that much of their campus computing is concentrated in basements. This is because those specialized spaces to support computer infrastructure were built during the 1960s—a time of civil unrest in the USA, particularly on college campuses. It was felt that the large mainframe computers of the day would be targets of anti-corporate sabotage. Basement bunkers were more defensible and generally didn’t have handy windows for tossing firebombs through.
This is a post about AI data centers.
@hal_pomeranz Thank you for helping us with our threat modeling.
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@hal_pomeranz Thank you for helping us with our threat modeling.
@cR0w @hal_pomeranz And basements flood, oddly enough
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If you visit the campuses of many universities in the USA, you will find that much of their campus computing is concentrated in basements. This is because those specialized spaces to support computer infrastructure were built during the 1960s—a time of civil unrest in the USA, particularly on college campuses. It was felt that the large mainframe computers of the day would be targets of anti-corporate sabotage. Basement bunkers were more defensible and generally didn’t have handy windows for tossing firebombs through.
This is a post about AI data centers.
@hal_pomeranz I know of a disaster recovery data center that is in the basement... wait for it ..... inside of a bank vault. Not built in the 60s though. Well, the vault probably was but was repurposed into a data center in the early 2000s
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@hal_pomeranz I know of a disaster recovery data center that is in the basement... wait for it ..... inside of a bank vault. Not built in the 60s though. Well, the vault probably was but was repurposed into a data center in the early 2000s
@cav I would have expected the cooling retrofit to be prohibitively expensive. I wonder how they managed it?
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@cav I would have expected the cooling retrofit to be prohibitively expensive. I wonder how they managed it?
@hal_pomeranz man I wished I remembered how the cooling was designed. I know it's under a massive office complex where a lot of costs are shared. I actually know of another smaller data center in a similar office complex and I know the cooling costs are shared between tenants(from an old deal with the owner of the building). I want to say that is sorta how it's working with the vault one too. For the vault data center there are two massive generators way on top of the many floor complex and it's run allll the way down into the basement.
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If you visit the campuses of many universities in the USA, you will find that much of their campus computing is concentrated in basements. This is because those specialized spaces to support computer infrastructure were built during the 1960s—a time of civil unrest in the USA, particularly on college campuses. It was felt that the large mainframe computers of the day would be targets of anti-corporate sabotage. Basement bunkers were more defensible and generally didn’t have handy windows for tossing firebombs through.
This is a post about AI data centers.
@hal_pomeranz Mmm—not sure about the causality. See, e.g., https://www.columbia.edu/cu/computinghistory/#year1960 — the Columbia University Computer Center (where I spent far too much time as an undergrad) was located underground starting in 1963, well before campus unrest. The Berkeley Free Speech Movement, one of the first large campus protests, was 1964-1965 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_Speech_Movement). I think that many academic computer centers were in basements because that's where there was enough space available.
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If you visit the campuses of many universities in the USA, you will find that much of their campus computing is concentrated in basements. This is because those specialized spaces to support computer infrastructure were built during the 1960s—a time of civil unrest in the USA, particularly on college campuses. It was felt that the large mainframe computers of the day would be targets of anti-corporate sabotage. Basement bunkers were more defensible and generally didn’t have handy windows for tossing firebombs through.
This is a post about AI data centers.
@hal_pomeranz In our old building, the original computer room was the whole of the ninth floor. As computers shrank, more and more of the computing was distributed around the building, and the ninth floor was slowly converted into lab and office space over time. Because it was a spec office building, the other tenants had computer rooms on their floors, which we gradually took over.
That building is now Moderna HQ and probably doesn't have any computer rooms any more.
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@hal_pomeranz Mmm—not sure about the causality. See, e.g., https://www.columbia.edu/cu/computinghistory/#year1960 — the Columbia University Computer Center (where I spent far too much time as an undergrad) was located underground starting in 1963, well before campus unrest. The Berkeley Free Speech Movement, one of the first large campus protests, was 1964-1965 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_Speech_Movement). I think that many academic computer centers were in basements because that's where there was enough space available.
@SteveBellovin @hal_pomeranz Also, as a matter of structural engineering, the heavy computers could be safely installed in the basement, and could even just *get to* the basement from the loading dock.
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@hal_pomeranz In our old building, the original computer room was the whole of the ninth floor. As computers shrank, more and more of the computing was distributed around the building, and the ninth floor was slowly converted into lab and office space over time. Because it was a spec office building, the other tenants had computer rooms on their floors, which we gradually took over.
That building is now Moderna HQ and probably doesn't have any computer rooms any more.
@hal_pomeranz (I wasn't there at the time, but for many years the CIA was a tenant in the building and Seymour Papert's Logo group was on the same floor, so some hackers made up a sign for the elevator lobby that read
INTELLIGENCE
CENTRAL ARTIFICIAL
<--------- --------->The CIA office was using a cover name there; it wasn't supposed to be public even though everyone knew. IBM and Polaroid were other tenants into the 1980s who had left before I arrived.)
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@hal_pomeranz (I wasn't there at the time, but for many years the CIA was a tenant in the building and Seymour Papert's Logo group was on the same floor, so some hackers made up a sign for the elevator lobby that read
INTELLIGENCE
CENTRAL ARTIFICIAL
<--------- --------->The CIA office was using a cover name there; it wasn't supposed to be public even though everyone knew. IBM and Polaroid were other tenants into the 1980s who had left before I arrived.)
@hal_pomeranz (The "C" in "CMS", as in the IBM Conversational Monitor System, originally stood for "Cambridge" and was developed in that building, along with CP, the "Control Program". They had computer rooms on the second and fourth floors.)
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@hal_pomeranz Mmm—not sure about the causality. See, e.g., https://www.columbia.edu/cu/computinghistory/#year1960 — the Columbia University Computer Center (where I spent far too much time as an undergrad) was located underground starting in 1963, well before campus unrest. The Berkeley Free Speech Movement, one of the first large campus protests, was 1964-1965 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_Speech_Movement). I think that many academic computer centers were in basements because that's where there was enough space available.
@SteveBellovin What did Murray Hill’s data center look like? We used large amounts of basement space in Holmdel, but we were a big mainframe center for the Labs.
Note for all you younger folks out there, Bell Labs Holmdel was abandoned for years and then repurposed. The building you see in the “Severance” exteriors and some of the interior shots is the old Bell Labs Holmdel building. It was also the location of my first Sys Admin job after I graduated in the late 1980s.
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