Breakfast Bytes Update: Learning & Support, Undersea Datacenter

This is one of my occasional posts where I update some posts that I covered earlier, but which don't justify an entire post of their own. However, I ended up with so much material that I split this post into two since it got so long.

Support and Learning Center

We’ve unified Cadence Training’s Learning Management System and Cadence Support (COS) to create the all-new Cadence Learning and Support System. And it's all now free.

With a single sign-on and an improved user experience, the Cadence Learning and Support System gives customers easy access to extensive content. And best of all, high-quality online training material that was previously offered at a cost is now available anytime, anywhere, at no cost.

For more details, see the video:

Please note:

• All technical training courses, Training Byte videos, Webinars, App Notes, RAKs, Troubleshooting Articles and other content can now be accessed through https://support.cadence.com.
• The Learning and Support System can be accessed by simply logging in with a Cadence Online Support account.
• Customers requesting blended/virtual training (or live public or private training when that resumes) should continue to contact their local Cadence Training representative.

Don't forget there is also the Cadence Support App available for iPhone and Android. See my post Online Support? There's an App for That! for full details. Or watch the video.

Datacenter in a Can

In February 2016 I wrote the post Datacenter in a Can. This was about Microsoft's Project Natick, which submerged a datacenter and used the sea to cool the servers and routers. That post was about a datacenter that was sunk somewhere off the West Coast (presumably near Seattle where Microsoft is based) and that experiment just ran for a few months Then, a couple of years ago, in May 2018, they sunk another datacenter in a can, this time of the coast of Orkney. Orkney is a group of islands off the North coast of Scotland. It used to be famous since it has a large harbor called Scapa Flow which was the chief British Naval Base for the Royal Navy during the first and second world wars. It is also where the Germans famously scuttled their whole fleet on 21st June 1919.

Anyway, a couple of weeks ago, after two years in the ocean, Microsoft retrieved the datacenter. There is a BBC report on it. It turns out that the datacenter had a pretty low failure rate. This is important, since unlike in a terrestrial datacenter, there is no opportunity to replace failed equipment.

Their first conclusion is that the cylinder packed with servers had a lower failure rate than a conventional datacenter. Just eight out of the 855 servers on board had failed.

You can read more on the project on Microsoft's Project Natick page. That page says that the failure rate of Project Natick Northern Isles was just 1/8 that of the land-based control group. Some more data:

The vessel is 12.2m length, 2.8m diameter (3.18m including external components); about the size of a 40' ISO shipping container). The atmosphere inside is nitrogen at 1 atmosphere.

The center contained 12 racks containing 864 standard Microsoft datacenter servers with FPGA acceleration and 27.6 petabytes of disk. This Natick datacenter is as powerful as several thousand high-end consumer PCs and has enough storage for about 5 million movies. It consumes 240KW, all produced from renewable sources (on-shore wind and solar, off-shore tide, and wave).

Tomorrow

OpenRoad and Starlink.

 

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