MEL - Meridian Energy

[Goldstein]

A 100,000 server centre would be one of the larger centres in the world and with modern equipment and the NZ climate would actually consume about 30MW running at near capacity.

Heaven only knows how you would currently pipe the quantity of data (requests and responses) between NZ and the rest of the world that would justify such a size.

Best Wishes
Paper Tiger

I guess it depends on the use. My day job concerns atmospheric modelling and we rent hardware in US data centres to get the compute close to the input data, and the output close (in terms of latency) to the clients.

The specs of the servers we use for modelling are a lot more power hungry than standard kit..

Generally the output is serveral orders of magnitude less than the input.

The price of running the stuff in the US is very cheap as well - cheaper than here.

I don't know what sort of kit or algorithms Google and FB etc use to run their market analytics. It might be quite different to what I'm assuming.

All of this was just to suggest another high energy user is possible.

[warthog]

Internationally, NZ is regarded as a higher-risk deployment environment for data centres. Nationally, Hamilton has the lowest risk profile, but the latency to major markets is still a major issue that won't be rectified through the provision of additional redundant international connectivity links.

Who would ever claim that redundant connectivity improved latency?

The hog can think of at least three occasions where data were sent back to Europe for processing by visiting academics because the computing resources are simple not available here.

[Zaphod]

Actually, you can't see what's over the horizon, PT. Of everyone here, you should be one of those who instinctively (feline genes) knows this is the case.

So quite a lot of what the hog thinks is going to happen in the future is processing. Huge number-chrunching facilities, which are given data to work on, but spit out only relatively small amounts of data.

Think Bitcoin. If PT had established a Bitcoin-mining operation next to Manapouri (with a contract for heavily-discounted power) in the early Bitcoin days, the coins would be ... virtually (see what the hog did there?) rolling in, and at quite a favourable cost.

Additionally, the connections between NZ and the rest of the world can only improve.

Especially with TEL/CNU starting to look like marginal players (CNU marginal in the sense that it loses much of the control over its destiny).

Interesting things are happening in the north of Sweden and Norway.

There are certainly some niche markets that NZ could capitalise on that don't require the transfer of huge data sets and would be enabled by cheap power and a relatively free and abundant supply of coolant, but they are certainly well on the horizon and I suspect that the countries like Sweden and Norway are the most likely candidates for those types of services at this point.

Perhaps if NZ remained relatively neutral, abandoning the five-eyes alliance and not siding with the US through the TPP, we would see more activity in this sector. That of course, would be a big ask!

[Goldstein]

Who would ever claim that redundant connectivity improved latency?.

I would. If you are approaching a bandwidth limitation then real latency can be affected. By having another pipe out of the country you alleviate this.

It's like bonding network ports on a LAN. You mostly do this for the additional throughput not the redundancy.

[Zaphod]

Who would ever claim that redundant connectivity improved latency?

The hog can think of at least three occasions where data were sent back to Europe for processing by visiting academics because the computing resources are simple not available here.

You could argue from the perspective that the redundant links could be configured as being load-balanced or teamed and providing the primary link is saturated, latency would fall as a result. But I think we're going to get awfully technical for a thread about Meridian.

As for data sets being sent back to Europe for processing, I agree that there's a nascent market there, but is it at the point where we can capitialise on it? Probably not at the moment but as a country, it would be good to have a strategy to attract niche services.

[sideline]

.............
Manapouri was bult with a high energy user in mind back in the Muldoon era, and the deregulated NZ market desperately needs a new one.

That would be the electric car.

[Snow Leopard]

....But I think we're going to get awfully technical for a thread about Meridian....

Actually, it seems that between us we have reached consensus that NZ is the place to build and operate a large computational intensive server array to confirm whether Deep Thought was actually right.

Best Wishes
Paper Tiger

[sideline]

Actually, it seems that between us we have reached consensus that NZ is the place to build and operate a large computational intensive server array to confirm whether Deep Thought was actually right.

Best Wishes
Paper Tiger

The answer will still be 42!

[CAM]

Maybe they should set up and mine for bitcoins??

[warthog]

I would. If you are approaching a bandwidth limitation then real latency can be affected. By having another pipe out of the country you alleviate this.

It's like bonding network ports on a LAN. You mostly do this for the additional throughput not the redundancy.

You're not seriously suggesting equivalence between LAN network ports and international links (other than in complete abstract) are you?