[Beowulf] New industry for Iceland?

[Vincent Diepeveen]

When i was in iceland some years ago for a long term meeting (no not  
the start of wikileaks - i was there for a less harmful reason)
the thing happened i had feared - for some days when i was there half  
of the internet adresses in Europe mainland
were impossible to reach from iceland. This happens regurarly from  
there.

I had taken the server lucky with me, thanks to www.hotels.nl for  
sponsoring that.

Usually Icelanders have 7 jobs, have more chessgrandmasters per 100k  
inhabitants than any other nation; actually
tomorrow i might play an icelander who emigrated to Europe. So the  
guy who's heading the new datacenter there is probably
a busy man. Just read on...

He'll first need to build a construction against the 3000+ small  
earthquakes a year Iceland has or so, then every component needed he  
needs
to import of course; a fuse broken? In Iceland that's BAD news - they  
might not be in store in a cirlce of 1000 kilometer around you :)

Then when something arrives at the airport, your datacenter equipment  
can travel over the only road the iceland has. Now if the datacenter
is on that road that's rather good news. If not then probably you  
need to be so lucky it was very well packaged as at the rocky surface  
there
everything trembles to pieces; probably that's why so many cars over  
there are using those massive wheels - when driving over small rocks
you feel that a tad less; but even these cars have problems with  
rocky surfaces with say a 5CM rocks. Only some bigger trucks which  
they do
not really have over there, can handle that - we have 1 such truck in  
Netherlands - it joins the big races.

This for sure is gonna be the lowest reliability type datacenter, yet  
it would be typically icelandic for the guy with the 7 jobs putting  
the datacenter
together to get something up and running there :)

Yet for vulcanologists it's an interesting island. Maybe one of them  
is interested in visiting Iceland and pay 15 euro for a hamburger meal.

Vincent

On Apr 20, 2012, at 3:37 PM, Prentice Bisbal wrote:

> Combine this article:
>
> "A Cool Place for Cheap Flops"
> http://www.hpcwire.com/hpcwire/2012-04-11/ 
> a_cool_place_for_cheap_flops.html
>
> With this paper:
>
> "Relativistic Statistical Arbitrage"
> dspace.mit.edu/openaccess-disseminate/1721.1/62859
>
> And it's looks like Iceland has a new industry: Datacenters for the
> high-frequency trading (HFT) gang.
>
> Just remember - you heard it here first, folks! ;)
>
> -- 
> Prentice
>
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