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China Building City For Cloud Computing
CWmike writes "First it was China's 'big hole' sighting that brought us the supercomputing race. Now China is building a city-sized cloud computing and office complex that will include a mega data center, one of the projects fueling that country's double-digit growth in IT spending. The entire complex will cover some 6.2 million square feet, with the initial data center space accounting for approximately 646,000 square feet, says IBM, which is collaborating with a Chinese company to build it. A Sputnik moment? Patrick Thibodeau reports that these big projects, whether supercomputers or sprawling software development office parks, can garner a lot of attention. But China's overall level of IT spending, while growing rapidly, is only one-fifth that of the US."
Hey look, I can store all my data on Chinese government owned computing equipment where they can read it at will and the government can then threaten to cut me off from said data unless I pay them a bribe! I can get all this for slightly less than I'm paying now! I'd be a fool not to!
Monstar L
Welcome our new chinese world overlords.
This isn't a joke. They're going to be the next world empire. Again.
Because the rest of us are going to be living in idiocracy and 1984.
someone will make a retarded joke about data owning you or something ...
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Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
Who needs one when you can build a City-sized DOS cannon.
Who cares about the absolute figure, anyway, it's the bang for the buck that's important. Soviet space program was cheaper than US one as well.
one-fifth the cost, dealing with four times the population
And in two years it will be just as obsolete as square feet.
Or a Dubai Tower moment?
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
... at Cloud City.
You sure this isn't some giant cloud based firewall that does deep-level packet inspection for all in-bound and out-bound traffic? Authority demand power in all its forms, naturally.
Oblig. to try and see if they will agree to call it Bespin.
Software is more important than hardware today. The whole cloud computing movement shows that in many cases hardware is just a cheap commodity. This datacenter is some politicians building themselves a monument and pretending to be ahead or at least on the same level with the west. This is just a lot of hot air, but otherwise quite irrelevant. Building a large datacenter is pretty easy, once you have the cash, and does not show any level of technological sophistication.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Instead of looking at the trend and extrapolate this to the next 10 years they say: "oh, but it's only one-fifth of what we are spending."
Maybe there is 5 times less pocket filling as their main motivation is not profit (yet) but innovation.
One fifth of the US IT spending may buy a lot more in China.... both in labour and in material...
If I were a country leader who didn't like china. I'd know the 1st spot to place a missile.
Looks like a massive project. But the question is... is it going to benefit us at all...
"But China's overall level of IT spending, while growing rapidly, is only one-fifth that of the US."
But it's what they get for that one-fifth given that their costs are so much lower. I've heard a number like 1/300th of the cost relative to the US but as I can't remember where I heard it feel free to ignore this statistic.
Same concept applies when they state that Chinese military spending is less than the US...maybe in actual USD but not in what they get for that money.
Just another example of American companies selling their souls and technology to the chinese. In 5 years time the Chinese be competing with IBM to setup these services, and everyone will wonder why we let it happen. It already happened with bullet trains.
But China's overall level of IT spending, while growing rapidly, is only one-fifth that of the US.
How much does the US spend on software (Which the chinese will get for free) and labour (which is much cheaper in china)?
Spending is not an absolute guide, the chinese have significantly lower costs in some areas than the US does.
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
Of course, it's not about the space, but what you do with it...
-- Let us endeavor so to live that when we pass even the undertaker shall be sorry. -- M. Twain
They're so brilliant. They just whisk flawless environmental impact statements through their streamlined and efficient environmental bureaucracy, each one a model of corporate citizenship and ethics. Plus, they power their giant data centers with love, not dirty coal like us stupid westerners. The Chinese would never tolerate the pollution and contamination inherent with coal, unlike we overweight corporate consumer-droids.
If only we were so smart...
Not to worry; we're still #1. They're only spending half as much as us, see? A dollar doesn't buy any more labor or energy in China than it does here. That dollar is just as heavily taxed in China, too. So obviously we're still way ahead.
Good luck getting your kid out of the house before 35.
"The term “cloud computing” is a marketing buzzword with no clear meaning. It is used for a range of different activities whose only common characteristic is that they use the Internet for something beyond transmitting files. Thus, the term is a nexus of confusion. If you base your thinking on it, your thinking will be vague.
When thinking about or responding to a statement someone else has made using this term, the first step is to clarify the topic. Which kind of activity is the statement really about, and what is a good, clear term for that activity? Once the topic is clear, the discussion can head for a useful conclusion. " - Richard Stallman
"One reason you should not use web applications to do your computing is that you lose control," he said. "It's just as bad as using a proprietary program. Do your own computing on your own computer with your copy of a freedom-respecting program. If you use a proprietary program or somebody else's web server, you're defenceless. You're putty in the hands of whoever developed that software."
Let me get this right, we're panicking that China might be taking over us technologically because they're planning to build a humongous data-center using...chips from American companies like IBM, Intel, AMD and Nvidia. Despite being multinational companies, these companies are all headquartered in the US, with a substantial portion of their staff (especially the execs and higher-skilled ones) based in the US.
A Sputnik moment would be if China build a world-class data-center using its own chips, designed and manufactured wholly within China that was also better than the ones in US.
This story is an absolute coup for American technology. China is going to give us a bucket-load of money for these chips (CPU/GPU etc). And as long as they're spending money buying these chips, they're not spending that same money improving their ability to design/manufacture their own chips and they'll always be behind as they're effectively buying commodity technology (rather than bleeding edge).
Chinese are known to use what they have efficiently, and it's not necessary to be big as American fallacy. Look at their population.
6.2 million square feet is about 600000 m^2.
646000 square feet is about 60000 m^2.
This is going to be even better than when Nigeria got internet connectivity. I can't wait for even fasters ways of getting Google Translate'd business proposals.
The data-alien is touching down all over the planet! Oh what fun! Data and computation and evolutionary principles grow into conscious-like clouds of swirling people posts and product purchases. There really are no countries anymore; just money looking for fine places to grow. Who would have thought that money has a mind of its own? Luckily we humans need our money plants and the data-alien just like we need our laws and list of friends. Oh the poetry of our modern times. There is no east versus west, only money doing its thing where it finds itself. The world is just a bunch of people coexisting with money and data - just fine I think.
``China Building City For Cloud Computing'' -- scientific progress, business development etc., vs. ``US To Fire Up Big Offshore Wind Energy Projects'' -- populism towards tree-hugging hippies, and not even cost-effective at that. Guess which action will pay back better in the longer run?
IBM just complaining that China was over taking the US in the computer arms race and that the US would be behind when something is not done right away.
I guess, by something needs to be done, they meant that they should build a giant Chinese data center to dwarf anything else in the world. USA! USA! USA!
I have no doubt that IBM's rationale was, hey, if we don't do it, another company will. We may as well get the cash.
Of course, China walks away with the unearned know-how.
In my RSS feed, my eyes read "China Building Cloud City." What a let down.
Hmm, I put that one through the sub textural analyser and got this:
"Chinese men in white coats will document every step of the way so that next time round they China will be able to do it themselves without the help of IBM thank you very much."
I love the way that the west has exported all of its skills, work, and lastly, money to regimes it claims not to admire. It's obvious which, out of democracy and totalitarianism, our politicians prefer.
Would not these huge data centers get obsolete if hard disks grow in capacity and processors in power 1000 times once again?
I mean couldn't the whole data-center then be placed on one server? Imagine a hard disk of 1000 TB and in addition - solid state, no energy for spinning.
Employees certainly could use all the space for fancy offices and the real data center would be somewhere in a corner.
Maybe they spend one-fifth because they aren't paying Microsoft the other four-fifths?
In America, lazy hipster run program from city on cloud computer;
In State Capitalist China, cloud computer run program on lazy hipster from city!
I thought that the whole point of "cloud" was to (within the limitations of bandwidth and latency) abstract away the details of location and configuration of the server iron so that the specialist datacenter guys could do their thing as efficiently as possible, and everybody else could be served up idealized abstractions corresponding to their requirements, whether that be idealized VMs that migrate around ugly physical hardware failures, or idealized email hosts that don't involve looking at the dirty details of the mailserver daemon and storage mechanism...
Wouldn't you just build the datacenter(s) wherever land and power are cheap, and then make sure that the places where the bright techies already are(university towns, etc.) have decent internet connectivity so that the developers and startups and so forth can talk to your fancy new cloud datacenters right from the coffeeshop where they already are?
Am I missing something about how "cloud" works, or is this something of a holdover of the classic command-and-control-white-elephant model of "Hey, let's build an entire city dedicated to activity X!"?
Although it was inferred in another post (and I didn't look through the hidden ones), am I really the first person to ask if they are going to call this new cloud city "Bespin"?
double-digit growth
What is that supposed to mean? You are talking like an economist! Firstly, you're making something of a dimensionality error by not specifying the time during which this growth is taking place. Secondly, you are not specifying the base in which this growth rate becomes "double-digit". Furthermore, even if the reader can guess your choice of base correctly, it conveys a rather arbitrary piece of information about the growth rate of China. I expect better from a technically-minded person. If it was actually coming from an economist, I would have just smiled, filled in the missing bits and gone on to be an appreciated colleague in that workplace, but with you, I still have my hopes that salvation is within reach and that's why I'm picking on it. Repent! Good luck!
Swedish plasma phys. PhD student; MSc EE; knows maths, programming, electronics; finance interest; seeks opportunities
Is China not a place that like...has a lot of earthquakes, or not?
I thought there was enough earthquakes to not build with too heavy materials or avoid too many sky scrapers....or maybe it was
just lack of money to do so, until government stepped up....any input would be welcomed.
Obviously off-topic, but interesting and wonderful fodder for the tin-foil hat crowd
It appears that China has built several cities meant to house millions of people, yet they remain completely empty:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1339536/Ghost-towns-China-Satellite-images-cities-lying-completely-deserted.html
http://www.libertynewsonline.com/article_340_30137.php
My mom always said, "Jim, you're 1 in a million." Given the current population, there are 7000 of me. God help us all!
Comment removed based on user account deletion
They already have a cloud city featured in the movie Avatar. Now it is going to be 'cloud computing city'. What is next? 3D cloud computing city?*
*Stupid /. will not let me write in Chinese!
Home of The Suki Series
Well I do detect a tinge of jealousy in the tone of some writings ('impressive...BUT...').
You got to like mega projects though, regardless whether the American or the Chinese are the main players.
The current political atmosphere in America is so virulently anti-intellectual that of the relatively small proportion of the population that can even understand the original article, most of them will just scoff at the Chinese and their "pointy-headed academics", step on the gas in their SUVs, and go back to plotting against foodstamp recipients. There are no "Sputnik moments" for a country where the majority of the population actively rejects the foundations of both the physical and biological sciences because they conflict with their bronze age superstitions.
Proud member of the Weirdo-American community.
Okay, let's say that I am enemy of organization X which host everything in that big-fat-oversized datacenter, just do something really stupid like [set/fly/throw] a [bomb/explosive/ddos/plane] [in/on/into/over] the datacenter and everything is gone... What? I hear someone yelling "DR and backups"? Nah!! the bad publicity will make the rest. The thing is that as bigger the datacenter is, the complex to manage will be and could be easy target because it is OVERSIZED.
"one of the projects fueling that country's double-digit growth in IT spending."
So what. Just because they're spending a lot of money doesn't mean they're getting results or doing anything useful. Boring.
I live in a Chinese village (Suzhou) with 6.5 Million inhabitants. You probably have never heard of it because it is just a village not a real city like Beijing or Shanghai. When I lived in the US at one time I lived in a "city" of 70,000 people. The district of Suzhou I live in has 10 times as many people as that and is just a district of a village in the ex-urbs of a city (Shanghai). City-sized means nothing.
To get the proper size words in the the article needed to consider the existing cloud data center sizes and use multiples of that, maybe that would be amazing maybe not. If not then we would know that this is just a... troll?.. a way to incite fear of the dread Chinese again? Or is it really something stupendous? therefore cool?
What I mean is "watch your language", don't be sucked in by inflammatory, fear producing language that really has little meaning. For a primer on this I suggest Doris Lessing's "Documents Relating to the Sentimental Agents in the Volyen Empire" a Space fiction approach (Lessing's terms) to the question of language usage to affect emotions.
Subversion of spatial scale luxury decoration ideas.