My mouth fell open as I drooled at the three towering racks, each about six feet wide, standing that same distance apart from each other. Each rack was slotted with five levels of sleek server blades that blinked silently. Mike pushed open a door built flush into the magic mirror, and I followed him into what appeared to be his personal server room.
I did a double-take when I noticed the sound in the room, or rather the lack of it. Given that there was no visible soundproofing between the servers and me, the volume of the cooling systems should have been loud enough to drown out speech at a normal volume. Instead, the room was quiet enough that I could hear Mike's footsteps!
"How in the world is it so silent?! This is like the quietest server room I've ever seen... heard. Is it using fully passive cooling or something?"
"Nope, it's definitely active, but it uses a new liquid-helium chip-level cooling method. The superfluidity means it takes almost no energy and thus no noise to wick away the heat, to the compressor and condenser outside. That's a jet engine by the way; I just have good soundproofing in the wall. It's not magic after all... The laws of thermodynamics still have to be obeyed."
"4 degrees kelvin in your frickin' basement?? Your tech here is insane!"
Mike laughed, "Decades of engineering, Izzy. Decades."
"Well, what are the specs?"
"Of this baby?" He pointed to the racks and I nodded.
***
Flexing the specs of the server I'd hand-built from parts to someone that truly appreciated them was a rare opportunity, and I revelled in it. "Ten hundred-twenty-eight-core processors overclocked to one terahertz, making for a full zettaflop of computing power, per rack."
Her jaw dropped open in an air of adorable awe. "Did you say TERAhertz and... and ZETTAflop??"
"Yup, there was a big breakthrough in clock speed when chip-level cooling came out, since heat was the biggest limiting factor. Anyway, for storage I've got twenty-five forty-exabyte BLC SSDs in a RAID-X array. That comes to basically a zettabyte of storage. There's also two hundred fifty-six pets of RAM and a couple off-the-shelf graphics cards I hooked up to it."
"Jeez, those numbers are mind-boggling. What's BLC and RAID-X? Where I'm from, RAID is just zero to six?"
"It allows for three drives to fail before suffering data loss. BLC is byte-level cell provisioning, meaning each cell in the SSD stores eight bits of data."
She didn't look too impressed by that. "What's the performance penalty for RAID-X?"
"There isn't any with the latest versions of RFS, that's why I use it. Filesystem is optimized for it," I added by way of explanation.
"Wow. You realize you've got more oomph here than all but the latest supercomputer in my dimension?"
"Yeah, I've heard that. You guys basically live in the stone age," I chuckled at my own joke and Izzy giggled adorably.
"What OS are you running on it?"
"A custom-compiled Arctic-based Tux distro." A lot of people from her dimension used weird proprietary operating systems.
"Tux?" She snorted. "You have a penguin as your OS?"
"A penguin? No, Tux is the open-source operating system that just about everyone uses, unless you need an RTOS for some weird reason. We don't use proprietary operating systems anymore."
"Tux is the cute penguin mascot for Linux back home."
"Oh, well I guess one dimension's mascot, another dimension's OS. Tux's mascot is just a tuxedo here."
YOU ARE READING
Your Move
Science FictionJust before 25-year-old programmer and chess IM (International Master) Isabelle drowns, she is pulled to the Diaper Dimension by the UN's Dimensional Rescue Group. Things don't quite go her way, but she has a powerful ally...
