24,280 research outputs found
Running Servers around Zero Degrees
Data centers are a major consumer of electricity and a significant fraction of their energy use is devoted to cooling the data center. Recent prototype deployments have investigated the possibility of using outside air for cooling and have shown large potential savings in energy consumption. In this paper, we push this idea to the extreme, by running servers outside in Finnish winter. Our results show that commercial, off-the-shelf computer equipment can tolerate extreme conditions such as outside air temperatures below -20Ā°C and still function correctly over extended periods of time. Our experiment improves upon the other recent results by confirming their findings and extending them to cover a wider range of intake air temperatures and humidity. This paper presents our experimentation methodology and setup, and our main findings and observations.Peer reviewe
To boldly go:an occam-Ļ mission to engineer emergence
Future systems will be too complex to design and implement explicitly. Instead, we will have to learn to engineer complex behaviours indirectly: through the discovery and application of local rules of behaviour, applied to simple process components, from which desired behaviours predictably emerge through dynamic interactions between massive numbers of instances. This paper describes a process-oriented architecture for fine-grained concurrent systems that enables experiments with such indirect engineering. Examples are presented showing the differing complex behaviours that can arise from minor (non-linear) adjustments to low-level parameters, the difficulties in suppressing the emergence of unwanted (bad) behaviour, the unexpected relationships between apparently unrelated physical phenomena (shown up by their separate emergence from the same primordial process swamp) and the ability to explore and engineer completely new physics (such as force fields) by their emergence from low-level process interactions whose mechanisms can only be imagined, but not built, at the current time
Rigid motion revisited: rigid quasilocal frames
We introduce the notion of a rigid quasilocal frame (RQF) as a geometrically
natural way to define a "system" in general relativity. An RQF is defined as a
two-parameter family of timelike worldlines comprising the worldtube boundary
of the history of a finite spatial volume, with the rigidity conditions that
the congruence of worldlines is expansion-free (constant size) and shear-free
(constant shape). This definition of a system is anticipated to yield simple,
exact geometrical insights into the problem of motion in general relativity. It
begins by answering the questions what is in motion (a rigid two-dimensional
system boundary), and what motions of this rigid boundary are possible. Nearly
a century ago Herglotz and Noether showed that a three-parameter family of
timelike worldlines in Minkowski space satisfying Born's 1909 rigidity
conditions has only three degrees of freedom instead of the six we are familiar
with from Newtonian mechanics. We argue that in fact we can implement Born's
notion of rigid motion in both flat spacetime (this paper) and arbitrary curved
spacetimes containing sources (subsequent papers) - with precisely the expected
three translational and three rotational degrees of freedom - provided the
system is defined quasilocally as the two-dimensional set of points comprising
the boundary of a finite spatial volume, rather than the three-dimensional set
of points within the volume.Comment: 10 pages (two column), 24 pages (preprint), 1 figur
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