At the same time, companies that must expand in-house computing would have new options. A firm in New York City, say, could augment its downtown data center with containers on a rooftop or in a parking garage—or in a low-rent warehouse in New Jersey. An oil company could mount a Blackbox on an offshore oil rig to run on-site operations as well as seismic monitoring. A humanitarian organization could set up emergency data centers to coordinate relief efforts in a disaster zone. The Pentagon could deploy mobile data centers to support combat operations.

Of course, the real-world viability of these installations is only beginning to be tested. Zoning and building codes could make siting tricky in some places. And few parking lots or rooftops come ready-equipped with an industrial 600-amp power conduit, an ultrahigh-bandwidth network connection, a hefty 60-gallon-per-minute water pipe, and a large chiller to cool the water. Security fences, cameras or guards would almost certainly be desired.

Nevertheless, early industry reaction has been favorable. InfoWorld magazine listed Project Blackbox as one of “12 crackpot tech ideas that just might work.” David Patterson, a noted computer scientist at the University of California, Berkeley, who sits on Sun’s technical advisory board, adds that Project Blackbox would allow companies “to put data centers closer to inexpensive or environmentally friendly sources of electricity, like a hydroelectric dam or a wind turbine.” And the spread of Blackboxes, he notes, “could significantly reduce the cost of utility computing—this notion that, in the future, an iPhone or whatever will be the only thing we carry with us, and most of what we do will be an online service.”

An Extended Conversation

Project Blackbox was inspired by a casual discussion two years ago between Papadopoulos and computer inventor Danny Hillis—although in truth, Hillis notes, that chat was only the latest round of a conversation that had gone on for more than a decade. The notion, he says, dates back to when he was chief scientist at Thinking Machines, Inc., a supercomputer maker in Cambridge, Mass., and Papadopoulos was an engineer he had just hired from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

“A bunch of us there liked to fantasize about what the world would be like when computers were really small and cheap,” Hillis says. “We loved the idea that you’d have a very simple machine on your desk and a lot of the work would be done back at some really big buildings full of computers.”

Thinking Machines closed shop in 1994, but the conversation continued. A decade later Papadopoulos, who had gone to Sun when that firm bought Thinking Machines’s technology, dropped by to visit Hillis at his new consulting company, Applied Minds, in Glendale, Calif. As the two men were puzzling over how to make the smallest and most energy-efficient computers possible, Hillis turned the question inside out: What was the biggest computer that could be built?

In practice, Papadopoulos reasoned, the biggest computer would be defined by the largest box that could be ship­ped around. As both men recall, that notion quickly put them onto the idea of building a system inside a shipping container. The container would be the computer.

This idea was not original. Brewster Kahle, another Thinking Machines alumnus, was already trying to supply developing nations with computer systems built into shipping containers. And the U.S. military had experimented with transportable data centers in trucks for field operations. But those designs had been for ad hoc, one-of-a-kind products. No one had done the serious engineering required to design a mobile data center as a mass-producible commodity.

Heat Dump

Intrigued, Papadopoulos asked Hillis and his colleagues at Applied Minds to design and build a prototype for Sun. The challenge was trickier than it might seem. Hillis could not just throw a bunch of servers into a container willy-nilly; they would fry themselves. A standard rack of modern servers consumes about 25 kilowatts of power, almost all of which ends up as heat. Conventional data centers are therefore built with plenty of space between the racks to allow for air cooling—a primary reason why data centers tend to consume so much floor space. Inside a sealed container, however, the heat would have no place to go. “That was the number-one technical challenge by far,” Papadopoulos says.

   
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