Going underground with Scaleway's Apple M1-as-a-Service: Mac Minis descend into Paris nuclear bunker
- Reference: 1612273186
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2021/02/02/m1_as_a_service/
- Source link:
Customers seeking the M1-as-a-Service experience can order up a Mac Mini M1 and be running in under five minutes, according to the company. The cost is €0.10 per hour with a 24-hour commitment.
[2]
The company claimed it could offer a "fully native Big Sur experience" with 8GB of unified RAM and 256GB of SSD storage. Accessing the hardware comes via VNC or SSH.
"24x7 Mac Fanboy Support" is also on offer and Xcode 12.4 comes preinstalled.
[3]
Scaleway, which has a long history of serving up Arm hardware for cloud users, reckoned the service is "the first of its kind in Europe."
[4]
White halls of Scaleway's underground data centre (pic: Richard Speed)
It won't be alone for long. Amazon already [5]sells EC2 instances based on Intel-based Mac Mini computers today and has said that instances featuring Apple's M1 chips were " [6]in the works " for 2021.
Running Apple hardware in the cloud is hardly a new concept. The likes of MacinCloud will sell managed servers to those who need them. For distributed teams, the allure of using such devices for macOS or iOS continuous integration and delivery certainly has appeal.
A scant few months after the first devices powered by Apple Silicon dropped into the hands of customers, a European cloud service featuring the hardware has arrived. Locals will no doubt appreciate the low latency of something nearby.
When El Reg [7]visited the facility back in 2019 , we were impressed with the gleaming tilework on show, although found [8]the channels responsible for draining excess Parisian water from behind the walls a little disconcerting. Everything was "under control," we were told.
[9]
We're sure that continues to be the case. After all, Apple devices and water are historically not notable bedfellows. ®
Get our [10]Tech Resources
[1] https://www.scaleway.com/en/hello-m1/
[2] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_personal_tech/front&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=2&c=2YBmFKveUsa@qSKwqKoPy2AAAANU&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D2%26raptor%3Dcondor%26pos%3Dtop%26test%3D0
[3] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_personal_tech/front&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=3&c=33YBmFKveUsa@qSKwqKoPy2AAAANU&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D3%26raptor%3Deagle%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[4] https://regmedia.co.uk/2019/06/17/scaleway-data-centrelrg.jpg
[5] https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/instance-types/mac/
[6] https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/new-use-mac-instances-to-build-test-macos-ios-ipados-tvos-and-watchos-apps/
[7] https://www.theregister.com/2019/06/19/underground_datacentre/
[8] https://regmedia.co.uk/2019/06/17/gutter-scaleway-lrg.jpg
[9] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_personal_tech/front&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=4&c=44YBmFKveUsa@qSKwqKoPy2AAAANU&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D4%26raptor%3Dfalcon%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[10] https://whitepapers.theregister.com/
> repurposed fallout shelter... channels responsible for draining excess Parisian water from behind the walls
I'm confused. How can a fallout shelter not be waterproof? Surely radiation would leak in and kill the people inside, or at least cause nasty mutations. Or was this Vault-Tec France's Supermutant breeding vault?
I'm confused. How can a fallout shelter not be waterproof?
France
Not so much fallout shelter
More of an underground shelter. It's 26 metres underground. I'm no geologist but if you're that far underground in a city with a decent sized river running through it, you're going to get some water ingress. It's easy to keep most of the water out, but it gets exponentially harder as you try and keep more and more water out. It gets to a point where it's cheaper to just pump out the water that does get in.
Plain stupidity is what it is!
Everything in Paris leaks! The underground graveyards (ossuuary) underneath Paris just ooze water from everywhere. You can't get away from the dampness because it was all originally a big swamp near a river! That means ANY bunker built there will leak like a seive!
As a direct comparison between the Paris bunker and our own massive data server farm in the Northern Mountainous Region of British Columbia, Canada, that datacentre has MASSIVE TUNNELS cut out two km deep into the side of a mountain. Each tunnel/cavern wall has tens of thousands of deep bored strain-relief compression bolts (4 cm in diameter!) drilled into the cavern walls keeping the mountain from crashing down into the resulting caverns and tunnels.
Then the exposed rockface was ALL shotcreted (i.e. sprayed with concrete) which was then sealed with Line-X-type polyvarathane waterproofing at 30 cm thick and THEN a full encased 60 cm thick steel-reinforced (rebar) concrete shell poured next to the coated wall to provide a flexible, waterproof, earthquake-resistant interior of over two million square metres! (20 million square feet!) that contains racks and racks of custom-built motherboards.
Mountains actually FLEX! They strain, move and compress which is why the 30 cm thick polyvarathane shell was installed first so the mountain could ALSO flex and compress against the interior STEEL REBAR reinforced solid concrete shell and not crack it.
And THAT is what I call a WATERPROOF underground bunker!
It will survive a 20 megaton nuclear hit too! And in case you are wondering, it's so remote that only a two to four hour drive on a barely passable mountain logging road (or a helicopter!) gives you access and twenty highly paid system administrators and hardware people rotate in and out on a 4 days on and four days off schedule from local cities and Vancouver.
They live onsite INSIDE the facility where they say its VERY QUIET and comfortable! If Armageddon ever happens, they have a three year supply of fuel for the computers and themselves plus a multi-year supply of freeze dried emergency food and other technical supplies plus multiple 4x4 vehicles!
It used to get cheap power from BC Hydro but lately it has gone all self-contained with giant tanks of Propane attached to Ballard-style fuel cells (thin membrane proton exchange) which have enough for fuel capacity for THREE YEARS of completely off-grid electrical power supply at a time!
On a technical basis, with two million square metres, that underground bunker makes it one of the world's LARGEST datacentres too! However it's all privately held running boatloads of custom-built CPU/GPU/DSP chips used for materials research, financial systems calculations and specialty physics simulations. This is the company's SECOND remote British Columbia data centre site which is newer and much much larger than the original one which was built in the late 1980's/early 1990's above-ground attached to normal BC hydro power (via 400 KV lines)
V
"After all, Apple devices any not-suitably-waterproofed electronic device and water are historically not notable bedfellows."
FTFY.