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Hot on the heels of our last round-up that explored high performance computing at an Icelandic ex-NATO base, it seems extreme datacentres are becoming a source of national pride, given the evidence of a new facility in Norway which uses the fresh freezing waters of a local fjord to 'cool its motherboards'. Over in Colorado USA meanwhile, plans are afoot to develop an innocuous looking one square mile plot into a fully sustainable microgrid driven datacentre operating at 100MW scale. Both are just drops in the ocean by Facebook standards, as the social networking monolith looks set to spend $1.6bn on its datacentre build-outs in 2012 alone.
Elsewhere, the UK's Metropolitan Police is waging war against organised crime gangs exploiting the lucrative black market in stolen copper cabling, with its new 'Waste and Metal Theft Task Force' picking up where 'Operation Ferrous' left off. But crooks are paying the price for their ill-gotten gains, say the police, who reveal two people are killed per week trying to steal cables.
On safer ground, IBM is looking forward to launching its 'Sequoia' supercomputer later this year. Twice as fast as anything else on the planet, the system will be capable of unleashing 20 petaflops of processing power and could be put to work modelling nuclear deterrents so that physical testing need no longer take place.
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