Posts by cyberdemon

HPE goes Cray for Nvidia's Blackwell GPUs, crams 224 into a single cabinet

Re: REMARK

Who is Mr Pricket and does anyone actually read TheNextPlatform? (Anyone who hasn't gone completely loopy like you, that is...)

Yes, i think we are going to need a new voltage standard for all this shit (datacentres, EV chargers, industrial heat pumps), somewhere between 400V and 11kV.

Most of the other standards are separated by factors of two or three, but there's a factor of 27.5 in that gap.

Can someone tell the IEC, please?

Probably not, but i'm sure it could hallucinate Crysis in real time for you ...

If a 1kW chip can "run" Doom via today's (de-)generative AI then i'm sure a 300kW rack could do the same for Crysis

Watt!?

Why do these people go so crazy for density? 0.3 MW per rack is just stupid. The datacentre itself is going to be dwarfed by the electricity supply infrastructure, never mind the water chillers.

Why such a focus on how much compute they can squeeze into one rack? You have plenty of space and a limited overall power input, so why not just have more racks at lower density? Wouldn't it be cheaper, easier to maintain, less disastrous if a forklift knocks one over?

Is it maybe something to do with interconnect latency?

AI's power trip will leave energy grids begging for mercy by 2027

Re: Conversation with a data center electrician...

Yes, and many datacentres in fact double up on the generator capacity, for two reasons:

One, because they need redundancy and maintenance windows

Two: because the most expensive/difficult part of a high power datacentre is the grid connection i.e. private substation, complete with HV switchgear, transformers etc. (Major supply crunch on for grid transformers atm..)

So to maximise ROI on the substation, they don't want to simply disconnect when the grid is overloaded, they run their Diesel/OCGT generators at double capacity, to power their operations while running the substation in 'full reverse'.

> You mean like holding off until the next "AI winter"?

Yes, at least AI is good for one thing if nothing else: Convincing privatised utility companies that they need to invest in infrastructure.

Just don't tell them that it's a bubble, otherwise they might not bother.

Re: energy use in America could outstrip supply within just a couple of years

"demand" is too grown-up a word for El Reg's new editors.. Or maybe Dan Robinson is an alias for the reg's ChatGPT subscription?

Sorry Dan but if you will make the same mistake on two articles ...

UK government plays power broker with small modular reactor suitors

Re: "i.e. a couple days worth of a 1GW(e) nuke plant,"

If it's a cavern, then er, how do they know it won't blow-out somewhere unexpected, or cause the cavern itself to collapse after repeated pressure cycling

I suspect these folks you talk of are just collecting subsidies for "green" tech research and don't actually believe that it will ever work in practice

> and of course 100GWh(t) is about 4 days.

4 days of 1GW(t) is 2 days of 1GW(e) given thermal conversion efficiency of about 50%

Re: Hmm

Yes actually flow batteries are fairly promising! Vanadium Redox Flow Batteries (VRFB) seem the most promising.

Although quite power limited (mostly kW-scale so far, copper and graphite requirements scale with power, vanadium requirement scales with energy, obviously), and the reagent is both expensive and pretty nasty (with different levels of nasty depending on its ionisation state i guess), personally i'd much prefer living downstream of a NPP or even a waste reprocessing site, than contemplate what would happen if a grid-scale VRFB leaked into my local watercourse.

Re: Hmm

I'm not sure about the Matrix, but we could put all the people of Milton Keynes into an Anaerobic Digester.. I wonder what that would be in terms of GWh

Molten Salt (thermal) storage would need to be utterly enormous, quite hard to maintain, and pretty dangerous. It would be like trying to get useful power out of a molten salt nuclear reactor without any nuclear reaction. Try doing the numbers on how big it would need to be to store 100GWh(thermal) energy i.e. a couple days worth of a 1GW(e) nuke plant, bearing in mind that the salt can't ever cool so much that it solidifies, otherwise it stops circulating and becomes hard to warm up again..

As the other poster said, pumped hydro requires an existing suitable geological feature such as a fjord or a flat-topped mountain, bit it is indeed probably the best option that we have.

Compressed air? I dread to think what the destruction would be like from the sudden failure of even a 1GWh compressed air storage tank.. It would make welding a nuclear pressure vessel look like an easy job i would think. It's also not very efficient.

Hydrogen is also an option, but again inefficient and mineral resource intensive (copper, platinum etc.) And H2 tends to leak even through solid steel.

Best option: nuclear. Second best: pumped hydro + wind. Third: gas.

Re: Hmm

> Which leaves what? Fusion or intermittent renewables that require grid-scale storage that doesn't currently exist.

Agree with you except this bit. Having spent a fair bit of my career in both Fusion and battery storage, I can tell you that neither are coming to save us any time soon. "doesn't currently" should read "won't in any of our lifetimes" .

Batteries can cover between a half and a couple hour's worth of load, which is great for plugging a gap while the gas turbines start up, but not anywhere near enough to cover 'dunkelflaute' periods. We are already rapaciously destroying the environment to produce batteries as fast as possible, we couldn't possibly mine enough materials and pollute enough lakes to support a 100-fold increase in battery production that would be required to get rid of gas.

And no, the chemistry won't improve either. Solid state batteries are nowhere near feasible for the power and cycle-life required (and require lots and lots of lithium), and Sodium batteries just suck. (Both gravimetric and volumetric power and energy densities are low compared to Lithium, and mineral requirements other than Sodium, such as Copper and Graphite, are more per kWh than Lithium)

As for Fusion, it's going nowhere either. Contrary to many people's beliefs, Fusion produces a LOT more radiation than Fission does. In fact all of its energy is transferred by "radiation" (mostly neutrons, which have a propensity to transmute elements such as Cobalt and make them radioactive) across a vacuum. There would be a lot MORE and hotter radwaste from a fusion power plant than a fission one, it's just that it goes cold after a few decades instead of millenia.

So Fusion would have the same regulatory burdens as Fission has, with the added issue of being almost completely infeasible technically.

I agree though, the solution is to stop worrying and love the bo^H^Hreactor. If people weren't so scared of nuclear, then it could be incredibly cheap to do, as it was in the 50s.

In the meantime though, gas is the cleanest reliable power source we've got. We need to build nuclear (fission) plants before it runs out.

UK's Darpa clone faces tough test next spring as government considers future funding

Re: Wads for the Boys...

We could, alternatively, subsidise nationally important science and technology at universities ...

Wads for the Boys...

The trouble with ARIA, is that as far as I can see it is just a "funding agency", no different to DSTL except perhaps with less oversight and due process

It will not have its own research labs / employees (unlike DARPA which it is supposed to emulate)

Instead it will just hand out wads of public money to anyone with a good idea the right connections...

A typical Boris Johnson / Dominic Cummings scheme indeed!

Don't open that 'copyright infringement' email attachment – it's an infostealer

Re: Why OCR?

It probably OCRs your screen.. And any image files it finds.

A lot easier to hide its network traffic if it isn't transmitting gigabytes of data back to its masters.

Re: FFS

Quite easily spoofed? Trivially, because if the extension is .EXE then Windows happily reads the icon from the .EXE file itself..

But that would be fine, so long as it was obvious that the file is an executable presenting with an "Adobe Acrobat" icon, rather than a PDF file.

I wonder if packaging in a ZIP also gets around the "This file was downloaded from the internet, are you sure that you want to open / run it" flag (as well as bypassing any email antivirus filters, as they can't see inside the encrypted zip, even when the trivial password is provided in the email)

Re: FFS

I thought for a second that even a complete numbskull would notice a .EXE and a .DLL in their .ZIP, and think it just a little bit phishy, but then I remembered that WINDOWS HIDES FILE EXTENSIONS BY DEFAULT.

Stop doing that, borkzilla, and you would save a few numbskulls paying customers..

Intel sued over Raptor Lake voltage instability

Re: First world problems

Another reason why filesystem-based redundancy such as that from btrfs, combined with LVM, is catching on.

Euro execs extend net zero timescales amid energy cost and supply crunch

Re: The real inconvenient truth

Agreed. But what I predict is going to happen is something along the lines of the plots of Moonraker / Fallout.

Certain very-rich people (i.e. definitely Zuck, but likely also Musk, Bezos, the usual suspects) have already spent Billions on building their own personal nuclear bunkers (presumably pre-filled with their own personal staff / perfect human seedbanks). These same people are in a position to manipulate world politics towards WWIII, in which all 7 billion of us bar the chosen few will perish. Then they and/or their offspring will emerge a few years later, on their perfect tropical island, which may or may not be long-dead and covered in radioactive ash (no idea how they might plan to deal with that to be fair - it could end up much more Fallout than Moonraker)

Sponsored by Aggreko

That Net Zero stuff is looking rather expensive and unreliable eh.

Who'd like to buy a big diesel genset in a box then?

UK orders Chinese biz to sell majority stake in Scottish chipmaker

Whack a mole

The only real problem I have with China owning FTDI is what horrors they could sneak into their proprietary Windows drivers, which are automatically downloaded and installed by Windows as soon as a device is plugged in!

But rather than cracking down on ownership of hardware companies, a better strategy would be to tell Borkzilla to stop automatically installing drivers, especially when generic drivers exist which could be shipped with their shitty OS

Schneider Electric ransomware crew demands $125k paid in baguettes

Why did the ransomware scum demand payment in French Bread?

Because hate baguettes hate ...

Former Facebook lobbyist joins UK comms regulator as non-exec director

According to the article, he was at Facebook long before Nick Clegg was, and was also a Lib Dem MP before Nick Clegg was. (based on his wikipedia page)

So he could even have been the one who tempted Sir Cleggy to the dark side..

Intel losses hit $16.6B in Q3 and Wall Street is … loving it?

Re: chipzilla no more

Chipsaurus?

Chiplodocus?

Microsoft tries out wooden bit barns to cut construction emissions

Re: Net zero

MS bitbarns power usage equates to how many Drax power stations?

How many "wooden bitbarns" per minute would they burn?

Re: Fire Resistance

Wooden datacentres have been tried before...

UK gov report to propose special zones for datacenters, 'AI visas'

> How many doctors have been struck off for an ill-judged tweet, and what did they say?

Here's one from a casual google: https://www.bmj.com/content/386/bmj.q2046 - Apparently they tweeted something agreeing with conspiracy theories about the covid vaccine, and it was judged that this was an abuse of their position of trust as a doctor.

I'd be surprised if this was the only such case, but we don't get to see the complete list in order to know. The only complete analysis I can find is from 2014 data: https://www.gmc-uk.org/-/media/documents/analysis-of-cases-resulting-in-doctors-being-suspended-or-erased-from-the-medical-register--63534317.pdf

Of the 119 cases in 2014, 19 were for "clinical issues", 24 were for "inappropriate relations" - 19 of which with a patient, 5 of which with a colleague. 48 were for "dishonesty", under half of which (21) was "in order to obtain employment" - the majority was "in their role as a doctor"

4 were for "breaching professional standards" of which 1 was "watching porn in the office". 16 were for their "personal life" i.e. some sort of crime outside of work. These last two categories are the ones I would expect an ill-judged tweet to fall into.

> but that is simply because employers are not prepared to pay fair money for the skill.

Sorry but while there apparently is a "Magic Money Tree", there is definitely NOT a "Magic Doctor Tree". Paying more money does NOT mean more doctors/teachers/engineers suddenly appear. All that "more money" does, is shuffle them around. Generally towards the south.

Ask a doctor / builder / engineer "Are you short of work?" The answer will be a resounding NO. Threfore the problem is NOT "People coming over here taking our jobs"

If we wanted more home-grown professionals, we should be subsidising university courses.

We could also do well by not "striking off" people for the smallest mistakes. If it takes a school-leaver 8 years to finish medical school, only to be struck off for an ill-judged tweet (for example) then that is a massive waste. Again I'd rather be treated by a doctor who had previously been struck off than no doctor at all..

Madness

See also: Britishvolt, UK Spaceports, Covid PPE, etc etc. Now it's AI

Name of the game seems to be to get your mate to set up a company in a hype-rich area, then declare massive public spending to make the UK a "world leader" in said area. Dish out a load of public money to your mate, then receive backhanders and wait for a cushy non-exec director job in your retirement. Chicken Dinner

It's truly bizarre the level of unabashed greed and corruption both main parties can get away with. I could understand the self-interested reasons for the previous Tory government backing Brexit and investing in Crypto (short the pound, go long on bitcoin, wreck the economy, profit) but all Labour seen to have done so far is do everything the Tories wanted to do, all the way to Trussonomics (albeit with spending funded more through Tax than Borrowing)

It's as if every party has shifted one step closer to the right. Labour are the new Tories, the Tories are the new Nigel Farage Party, and the Nigel Farage party is the new BNP. So after 14+ years, nothing has changed, we've still got a Tory government.

BTW, another of Kier's Thatcherite policies is keeping (and expanding) the Freeport project (interesting reading in the back of every Private Eye..). I mentioned in another thread that Ratcliffe power station is set to become a Freeport Tax Site. No doubt it'll also be a "special AI zone", too!

The utterly daft thing is that we are critically short of trained professionals in professions that require proper training, such as medicine, teaching, electrical engineering, etc. And there are lots of very well trained and educated people desperate to work here, who would work extremely hard for not very much because their home just got bombed by Israel or Russia. The ones on the boats are not the peniless uneducated masses some people think they are, but the few wealthy and educated enough to escape their situation at all.. A lot of them COULD work, but I certainly wouldn't pick any who cite AI as their qualification..

But all those types we shut out and bar from working, paying tax and contributing to the economy, while we force them to live in expensive prisons/"hotels" that We the taxpayer pay for.. Plus we already kicked out the ones from Europe that used to work here too (and who were doing a great job).. Why? Because we are greedy and prefer a shortage economy that drives inflation?

Whereas AI graduates, we have far too many of those already. Seems to be the only thing our universities can produce are people who cheat on their coursework. Congratulations you are now an AI graduate...

What would you prefer, a community nurse who's come on a boat from Lebanon, or no community nurse at all, cos we can't find or train any

Whereas if the question is about an AI expert, wherever they've come from, the obvious answer is "None at all, please!"

Re: Data Centre Locations

No, let AI use Solar Power and launch it all into the Sun

US Army should ditch tanks for AI drones, says Eric Schmidt

Next gen tanks will be unmanned

That is all.

Much easier to armour something if it doesn't need to contain wet squishy things that need to eat, breathe and shit

Tanks will be replaced by solid-cast robot tanks, with the same horrifying implications as autonomous aerial killer drones.

Datacenter developer says power issues holding up new builds

Re: The problem's not power supply, it's the datacentres

It will have a pre-existing substation going from 25kV at ridiculous Amps at each of the turbogenerators, to 400kV for grid transmission. Maybe a few different voltages in between.

I think that would be retained because grid transformers are bloody expensive and getting harder to acquire. There's no reason it can't run in reverse i.e. taking power off the 400kV grid and outputting 25kV, all that's needed are a few more transformers to take the 25kV down to 400V for datacentre operations and anything else on the site.

Fault current etc is all handled by the switchgear and protection relays found at any substation, regardless of which 'end' it is at. Probably they would do some more upgrades of the substation to connect more local distribution loads, as you point out 2GW is more than even a datacentre the size of the whole site could use, i'd have thought

Re: The problem's not power supply, it's the datacentres

Yep, and very few "british jobs" created by a datacentre anyway, per £millions investment. Apart from a few security guards and network bods it's all profit for the owners.

At least they have to pay tax on that profit... right?

... Wrong? I hear that the (enormous) site of the former Ratcliffe-on-Soar power station is to be made a "Tax Site" as part of the East Midlands Freeport.

The site obviously has a _massive_ pre-existing Grid connection, and I can see the main use of the site being for datacentres.. I also can't see the use of an inland "freeport" for much other than allowing shady operators to use our 'leccy and our land to make massive profits without paying a penny in tax, and probably also outside of pesky regulations like GDPR etc.

Linus Torvalds: 90% of AI marketing is hype

Re: Only 90% ?

OK, sounds plausible. But Why are you posting a "shortened" URL?

I can only imagine it either points to something weird, or you are trying to find the IP addresses of reg commentards. Otherwise surely you would have just posted the straight URL.

Re: Only 90% ?

Linus has gone soft. He'd previously have said what he really thought i.e. 100%, and told the AI companies moaning at his statement (especially nvidia) to go and fuck a duck, but maintaining the world's most popular OS kernel has probably become a lot more expensive in the last decade or two, so he has had to tone down the vitriol a tad to avoid rubbing any bigwigs up the wrong way.. :(

Beijing claims it's found 'underwater lighthouses' that its foes use for espionage

Re: The fools

Or perhaps they are "sea-weather balloons"

Google reportedly developing an AI agent that can control your browser

Hmm, letting the bugger trundle off and do research might be useful,

Not in an age where you can be made an un-person for "researching" certain topics..

"It wasn't me who clicked on the [insert banned thing here], it was the AI"...

GenAI's dirty secret: It's set to create a mountainous increase in e-waste

Re: GenAI

I thought [nearly] all LLMs were Generative AI ...

Or did you think "Gen AI" meant "Artificial General Intelligence" aka AGI? That's not a real thing.

UK’s new Minister for Science and Technology comes to US touting Britain's AI benefits

Re: Done some things, not done others

Don't worry. When Kier Starmer says "AI Benefits", he doesn't mean "AI jobs and datacentres in the UK". He means he'll give any US "AI company" access to the private data of every UK citizen, starting with the NHS and Palantir.

We don't need much energy to export all our data across the atlantic over a few ultrawideband fibre optic cables.

Polish radio station ditches DJs, journalists for AI-generated college kids

Re: No, but maybe

And doesn't in fact "store" any tracks, but generates completely "new" ones on the fly from all the world's art that it has stolen er, "learned from", and thus avoids paying a penny of royalties to anyone, while it learns your habits and preferences and flogs them to data brokers the world over.

Viable fusion power in a decade? Tokamak Energy dares to dream

Re: He meant...

er, It can't and it doesn't.

while we no longer have coal, we are still massively dependent on gas and somewhat-younger dead trees. I have not seen a single day where we have "not fired up any gas plants" - never mind a string of such days in a row.

Don't forget we also have a lot of interconnectors, bringing coal/gas/nuclear power from Europe, although currently three out of four links from France are down, plus one from Norway. I'm sure they are spurious faults, not Russian sabotage.

Go to gridwatch.co.uk, look at the "this year / last year (Day averages)" graph, and find me a day where we have not used gas or biomass.

Re: He meant...

Solar and Wind can never compete with Oil and Gas, because it's neither constant nor dispatchable. Tidal is only marginally more feasible than Fusion. "Long Duration Energy Storage" without an existing mountaintop lake is also about as feasible as Fusion. So if anything, those renewables support the oil and gas industry, by ensuring that we all need gas peaker plants and backup diesel generators. So i'm not surprised to see Big Oil pushing money their way.

I would be surprised to see Big Oil investing in nuclear fission though.

Re: He meant...

Fueled by a Deuterium-Fairydust reaction..

I find it quite depressing actually when I see major investors in Fusion: Shell, Exxon, BP, Total..

They aren't daft, they know full well that Fusion has a snowball's chance in Hell of ever being feasible/scalable/profitable, never mind threatening the oil industry, but they know that it pulls public support and engineering resources away from Fission, which really does pose a threat to their business.

Intern allegedly messed with ByteDance's LLM training cluster

"ByteDance has terminated an intern "

Sounds like they've lost more than their internship..

You win the Internet today :D

Gary Marcus proposes generative AI boycott to push for regulation, tame Silicon Valley

In other news (waiting for it to be covered by the Reg)

TikTok supposedly sacked an intern for "sabotaging" their AI training. I am curious as to what was done, how it was done, and whether it can be done more widely, rather than just by one heroic intern.. :D

Tesla, Intel, deny they're the foreign company China just accused of making maps that threaten national security

Yes, it has often puzzled me as to why China are quite so paranoid about accurate mapping to the extent that it is almost completely banned

It's as if they are expecting a war (but presumably not a full on nuclear war with the USA/NATO, since the cartographic scrambling doesn't protect against nukes) or at least serious civil unrest in the not so distant future, and they don't want incoming missiles/drones to hit their targets

Richard Branson to take balloon ride to edge of space

Well, presumably had the Hindenburg been filled with an inert gas, then any fire in the fabric would have been swiftly extinguished by the leaking gas, so yes I think it probably did make a difference ...

Intel hits back at China's accusations it bakes in NSA backdoors

Re: I don't think Intel is [baking?] backdoors in[to] its products

https://www.techrepublic.com/article/is-the-intel-management-engine-a-backdoor/

Intel says it's not a backdoor. Huawei to doubt them?

Amazon makes $500M bet on itty-bitty nuclear reactors to fuel cloud empire

Re: It’s just a smokescreen for their real plans

Same-hour delivery on Prime Air Ballistic!