There is a thing left over from the 90s that may still raise its fuzzy little head from time to time and I wondered about it the other day when I was asked if we had an UPS. My first experience with the uninterruptible power supply concept was found in the dark in the Navy's Battle Lanterns of great and unforgiving darkness. When a ship loses power unexpectedly it gets very very dark and so they have these lanterns that automatically energize when the circuit feeding them power dies. They have batteries in them and there is a preventive maintenance check to ensure the lights are tested routinely and batteries replaced as required. What one usually finds in the less visited places on a ship is that when the power goes away the lights do not come on.
So we had the UPS back in the day to give our sailors just enough time to safely power down the surveillance systems so they did not suffer any damage due to a sudden unplanned loss of power. We stressed in training that it was just enough time to shut the damned thing down and not to mess around if we wanted the systems to restore properly when the power came back. You can guess how that played out in the event.
I was wondering though, after Fukushima and other disasters, what does the UPS look like for a huge Data Center or an AI? There was a wonderful description of the death of the last AI in The Postman. I thought it was one of his better books but then I liked all of his books except for everything after Earth. I imagine a Data Center UPS would be about the size of New Hampshire and provide enough power for about 5 minutes. I'm thinking the AI is doomed.
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Having been the lead network engineer for a multinational company, I had the opportunity to work with our own as well as several large hosting facilities that were 99.999% uptime. The way we did it was N+1 generators and 90 minutes of full load batteries. N+1 is where N is the number of generators required to fully power the facility. The plus one was for fault tolerance. In our case, one would work so we had another as a backup. They were tested weekly and serviced quarterly. The batteries were tested enough with our brown outs and short blackouts before the generators kicked on. The biggest problem was cooling. Even in winter we had to run the air handlers to keep all that gear cool. Larger facilities such as major AI facilities most assuredly have multiple utility providers with their own local substations and transformers to help with the need for a lot of batteries but they would still have banks of the biggest generators.
I sometimes forget that system power requirements are far beyond the norm expected from utilities these days and that engineers always have them in the plans and test them routinely. This last week I had a fascinating tour of a production facility in Pittsburgh that amazed me. It was a company doing things with Red and Black that were heresy and burn-at-the-stake stuff back when I was an adjunct working for DIRNSA.
All competent network/system administrators will have a back up power supply adequate nro maintain function long enough for an orderly shut down. Many UPS systems include software that will automatically shut down systems if they are activated without need of human involvement. Of course not all admins are competent and not all bean counters will provide the necessary funds to procure and implement such systems.
I don't think AI folks intend on "orderly shutdowns".
SNIP
Google announced on Tuesday that it has signed a deal with nuclear energy startup Kairos Power to purchase 500 megawatts of “new 24/7 carbon-free power” from seven of the company’s small modular reactors (SMRs).
And others have restarted 3 mile island nuclear plants for THEIR OWN Exclusive use...
SNIP Three Mile Island nuclear plant makes comeback with $1B in federal backing to meet increasing energy demands
Microsoft partnership drives restart of Pennsylvania reactor to power AI data centers
Techo-Tyranny doesn't accept loss of power.
Movies like "the Hunger Games" were foreshadowing.
SNIP Manipulate and control their environment
Psychopaths often give hints as a way to manipulate and control their environment.
Going to get UGLY folks.
That's where we were 25 years ago with the System Upgrade. The UPS furnished just enough time for orderly shutdown but it was not an AI. Would a shutdown "kill" a nascent AI? Probably. Would it be the same AI if the power came back on later and it rebooted to life? Probably not. Interesting question today about planning for survival based on your understanding of generations of people hating your people. How would an AI cope with loss of power? That of course was always the go to for out of control AI, just pull the plug and menace is over but how can you write a Terminator movie like that?
I like Japan and have high regard for their engineers and planners but Fukishima drove home the limits of planning vs hijacked reality. I'll be curious to see the data center satellites sporting their little permanent parasols to keep the sun off the thinking parts of the spacecraft.
"Ups is downs" was a saying we had on the FFG. The gas turbine control panel had a UPS that went on the fritz from time to time. I wasn't a snipe and don't recall the details how the system worked back in the late 80s, but it was probably nothing more than a couple of lead acid batteries in series.
Is the death of AI necessarily a bad thing?
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