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QUESTION THREE:

If servers take up so much space, then does the warehouse they’re in just have to be Big Enough or can you wire servers together over multiple floors with long enough cables? Does this impact processing time? With huge server systems like Google, do they even HAVE an access point or a central node or is it just one, MASSIVE conglomeration of processing power?? Are there different types of cable for different purposes of what the servers are doing?? Im going insane. Madam I’ve been struck with The Ailment (ADHD)

OK! This one is really interesting because it's the reason why I don't believe that the Circus is abandoned. I mean that in the way that if TADC is following any kind of realistic standards, then the physical hardware behind the circus can't be just tucked away in an abandoned building somewhere. The demands for power and cooling are high. Even if we assume that automated systems take care of that, hardware WILL fail over years of operation.

(Sorry this took so long) Once again, long post under cut

Have you ever seen Google go down? Maybe Youtube? In the past when they were a small website, sure, but not anymore. If you can make a connection, then you will be able to reach those servers. I assume that the circus has a similar setup, as No matter what, there is a digital space for the humans to occupy. That means that there is ZERO downtime.

But these devises live in the real world, connected to the very real power grid. How can they be powered 24/7? A bad storm hits the area and a tree takes out the power lines, do all of the websites hosted on those servers have to wait the hours, possibly days for that line to be fixed? Nope! These centers advertise 24/7 service and they mean it. What this means is that typically, they will have ON SITE generators that can run the ENTIRE center at a moments notice. Some even have an extra generator on standby in case one of the generators malfunction. Redundancy is the name of the game. If something is essential to function, then there WILL be an exact copy on site as a backup. That is why these big websites never go down for service, there is ALWAYS something available to connect to.

But what most people don't realize is the water requirements. Have you ever seen the statistic that chatGPT consumes like 2-3 THOUSAND liters of water every day? And thought, why the fuck does a computer need water? Isn’t water a bad thing for computers? But water has a very useful ability in the way that it handles heat. It’s the same way how your sweat evaporating cools you off. Think of cooling as just removing the heat instead of actually making cold. So water is used in the cooling of these data centers, which is to say, water is used as the refrigerant. It’s a similar concept to how your fridge works, except the refrigerant is lost over time. The water is allowed to evaporate and leave the building because it makes for more efficient cooling. Here’s a video that goes more into detail about water loss cooling for data centers specifically.

As for the actual building, data centers with multiple floors do exist! The reason one may be a single story has more to do with the cost of land vs the cost to build a building with multiple floors that can support the weight of all of those machines. If land cost more than the steel and concrete needed for multiple floors, then. yes, the shorter the cable the more efficient the data transfer, but the time loss is so short that it’s pretty much unnoticeable to the human eye. Some places also standardize their wire lengths, so every server gets the same load time regardless of the actual placement of the server.

But the people who care about that are insane stock traders (not gamers believe it or not) and advancements have made it so that time delay only starts to matter when a cable reaches miles long in length. And those advancements are Fiber Optics! Fiber being literal fibers (either glass or plastic) and Optics as in lenses or reflection. This is because fiber optic cables carry light instead of electricity. Because light is fast as fuck. So then where does the delay come from? Turns out even with the most reflective, chemically perfect fibers, light scatters and eventually data is lost. So repeaters are put in to repeat the input signal, refreshing it. But these repeaters aren’t perfect, so lag is eventually introduced, so modern fiber optics use amplifiers. Amplifiers strengthen the original signal instead of repeating it, making for faster transfers of days.

But you want to know about how these things are wired in terms of electricity! How these things can fit so much electricity in one building? The answer is industrial grade wiring! It's different from the power cables that you find in your house. Well, the wires themselves may be the same, the difference comes in at the fuse box. Here’s a lady plugging all of the wires in a house into the fuse box. The box itself is then plugged into the power line, which provides the electricity. Multiple lines or higher gauge lines will be ran from the power plant to the data center. The exact set up depends on where the data center is in relation to the power plant, who’s building it, and state laws.

Also, for industrial wiring, they usually run the wires through metal pipes instead of letting the wires sit against the insulation. Here’s a guy who wired his house like this. He doesn’t go into detail about what everything means but you don’t need to know all of that to appreciate the pipe work. If you want me to go into electricity as a form of power and the different phases of AC... I'm going to be honest just call me on discord so I can get out the whiteboard. I will give you a whole college grade lecture about how electricity works.

Servers don't have a central node, their operation and purpose is different from computer clusters. While each unit is wired together in a cabinet, each unit operates as it's own individual machine. So, a computer cluster will be spreading one load over multiple machines, a server takes many small loads (<- terrible oversimplification but it works). Everything around it exists to route the right requests to it, power it, cool it, and monitor its operation. But they do have access points! As in, you can connect to it directly or use SSH shell to remotely connect to it. SSH shell is just a secure way to connect to the server, as a maintenance level of access is usually not something that you want anyone to be able to pick up on.

Last but not least, YES! There are many different kinds of cables made for different tasks! Or just to be cheap. The more you get into engineering the more you realize half the shit that we do is because it's the cheapest option that still meets requirements! I left some interesting videos in the bottom of this if you are really curious, but I honestly think that figuring out the exact wires is getting a little too into the weeds for this.

So, to summarize, data centers need generators, water for cooling, and have spare copies of pretty much everything. That’s why it’s so god damn rare to see big websites like google docs down but Ao3 goes down every now and then. He's a bunch of helpful videos that I uses when writing this.

Why the Internet Is Running Out of Electricity

I Can't BELIEVE They Let Me in Here!

Data Center Cooling

How Does LIGHT Carry Data? - Fiber Optics Explained

fiber optic cables (what you NEED to know)

What Ethernet Cable to Use? Cat5? Cat6? Cat7?

How I wired my house.

How I wire a panel (an in-depth tutorial)

Troubleshooting an outlet (interesting video)

Computer science slander

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