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I thought about another very reliable system; deep under the sea the NSA has a big switch that is splitting deep underwater communication lines; Now this one h
by MichaelMoser123 13y ago
I thought about another very reliable system; deep under the sea the NSA has a big switch that is splitting deep underwater communication lines;
Now this one has to work 24/7 in a hostile environment; has to be hidden; has to deal with enormous quantities of data and it costs a lot to replace/repair so it must be very reliable.
What is driving technological progress? Instead of a space program, we now have political control of the Internet as driving forces. I guess that's what they mean when they say that civilization is turning inwards ;-)
Yes, in many areas the NSA and Google are pushing the envelope; long term data storage; map reduce of large data sets; AI, you name it, they have it.
- nwh 13y agoI imagine under the sea is actually quite a nice place to be, if you assume perfect waterproofing. There's litte radiation penetrating the water, so there's less chance of bit flips I imagine. You don't need to worry so much about cooling, as the whole ocean is your heatsink. Accessibility would suck, but a bunch of redundant hardware wouldn't be awful. Weren't they using hardware in submarines anyway?
- ars_technician 13y agoThese switches are usually fiber splits so they are slightly less complex than you are envisioning. The equipment doesn't have to actually duplicate L2 frames. It just uses standard fiber repeaters (already a common component in undersea cables) to get it back to a more friendly environment where they can actually decode and process it.