Hacker News Reader

Comment by textfiles | Hacker News Reader

What do you want some pictures of?

An article about "infrastructure" that opens up with a dramatic description of a datacenter stuffed into an old church, I would expect more than just generic clipart you'd see in the back half of Wired magazine.

Here's some photos I took a long time ago.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/textfiles/albums/7215763372220...

Thanks! The church attendees (employees?) have a Severence Kier vibe... although I'm guessing the TV show came much later.

That's super cool! Can the IA building be accessed by some random people like myself? Next time I'm in SF (who knows when that will be though) I'd very much like visiting it!

Fridays at about 1pm, we give tours.

That's great. Ask and ye shall receive.

What's most surprising is churches notoriously have really sketchy electrical. There had to be some renovation in that regard, right?

No regular residential building is set up to host a datacenter off the bat. Even racking more than half a dozen boxes in a given room requires an upgrade.

Most rooms in North America won't be wired for anything over 2.5 kW by default (kitchens and laundry rooms being obvious exceptions).

An electric dryer might pull 5 kW. An electric range ballpark 10 kW. Versus 15 kW per full rack for a fairly tame setup.

And then you've got the problem of dissipating all that heat.

There was a lot of renovation. One day they fired up the pipe organ (which still works) inside the building as well as the servers and the transformer for the street blew up. That was a legendary day.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com