Notes on life, art, photography and technology, by a Danish dropout bohemian.
When you drink the water, remember the river.
Tuesday, August 28, 2007
A big UPS
UPS is a courier company, but it also means Uninterruptible Power Supply, a box which makes a computer run on in case of a power cut. Here is a story of installing a really big one. Six tons!
I've seen bigger. A tester house moved in next to us on the old Cirrus Logic campus. They had 3 generator/backup containers (30' shipping containers) lined up outside the building during that summer of black outs in the US/CA.
Our UPS at the time was about 1/4 of the size of the digital forest ones, and when we moved out it was cheaper to sell the unit to the landlord bargain basement price than to uninstall it.
I forgot to read how long the digital forest UPS can last with their amount of storage. Is it enough to keep the building up? Or just to down the servers gracefully.
When you make an IC (computer chip) you need to test it. A test house or tester house is a building which contains "testers". These are machines which stand about 8' tall, and cover about 15sq ft. Their function in life is to run "vectors", a matrix of signal stimulus and sample compare value for at speed dynamic testing of a chip.
These machines are high speed, needing to sample at multiple times per tick, clocking data in the GHz range on hundreds of pins per part.
These machines are married to handlers, pick and place machines which can put untested parts into the tester, then place tested parts in reject, slow speed, fast speed and good part "bins".
They are sometimes also connected to temperature control machines to test parts over temperature range.
The compute power in each machine is considerable, and as a consequence their power consumption is high, their heat output is high and your AC (air conditioning) therefore has to increase to cope. This all leads to a large power demand.
Since each machine costs millions you want them in continuous use to pay off the investment, even an hours outage is a significant loss.
Where are all these chips going? Probably into the server farms, where they invest millions in disk storage and retrieval system, and offer 24/7 data availability for their clients who want to advertise and sell to a world web surfing consumers. Every hour of server outage is lost revenue to the clients, and probably lost revenue to the server company.
4 comments:
Big up to digital.forest. That's a mighty system.
I've seen bigger. A tester house moved in next to us on the old Cirrus Logic campus. They had 3 generator/backup containers (30' shipping containers) lined up outside the building during that summer of black outs in the US/CA.
Our UPS at the time was about 1/4 of the size of the digital forest ones, and when we moved out it was cheaper to sell the unit to the landlord bargain basement price than to uninstall it.
I forgot to read how long the digital forest UPS can last with their amount of storage. Is it enough to keep the building up? Or just to down the servers gracefully.
What's a "tester house"?
When you make an IC (computer chip) you need to test it. A test house or tester house is a building which contains "testers". These are machines which stand about 8' tall, and cover about 15sq ft. Their function in life is to run "vectors", a matrix of signal stimulus and sample compare value for at speed dynamic testing of a chip.
These machines are high speed, needing to sample at multiple times per tick, clocking data in the GHz range on hundreds of pins per part.
These machines are married to handlers, pick and place machines which can put untested parts into the tester, then place tested parts in reject, slow speed, fast speed and good part "bins".
They are sometimes also connected to temperature control machines to test parts over temperature range.
The compute power in each machine is considerable, and as a consequence their power consumption is high, their heat output is high and your AC (air conditioning) therefore has to increase to cope. This all leads to a large power demand.
Since each machine costs millions you want them in continuous use to pay off the investment, even an hours outage is a significant loss.
Where are all these chips going? Probably into the server farms, where they invest millions in disk storage and retrieval system, and offer 24/7 data availability for their clients who want to advertise and sell to a world web surfing consumers. Every hour of server outage is lost revenue to the clients, and probably lost revenue to the server company.
No wonder we all want a good UPS behind us.
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