Big doing’s in Babel. IBM is coming, the news media tell us. City hall has issued a press release to share the excitement. As the federal and provincial governments are sharing some of the cost, they also issued news releases. Despite the news conference by federal and provincial politicians being held at the University of Toronto, the Babel media played the story up big. There will be jobs for locals when the large data centre in Babel is completed in the fall, they tell us.
But nobody seems to know how many jobs will be created in Babel.
The answer is not many. The entire 10,170 square meter (109,468 square foot) complex can be run remotely from Toronto. The most work around the centre will be checking the water filters for the chillers and cutting the grass. It might be a big data centre, with special computers, but it is still just a data centre.
Not many data centres can handle data coming to it at 10 billion bits per second, nor compute at trillions of floating point operations per second. That is the scale of super-computing these days. There are not too many IBM Blue Gene/Q centres available and Ontario’s universities are expected to make good use of this one. That is the reason the federal government has contributed $20 million to the project and the Ontario government has contributed $15 million. They are supporting university research.
The real jobs—as many as 145—that this project creates will be with IBM in facilities mainly in Markham, Ontario. That is why IBM Canada expects to spend as much as $175 million on the project over the next three years.
According to the city press release, the choice of Babel was determined by such things as the ready availability of electricity and water. Many Ontario locations have that. What is unique to Babel is that it is a crossroads of communications. This centre needs a private 10 Gigabit Ethernet connection to seven of Ontario’s major universities. Being central to this capability in Ontario’s communications structure is why Babel-on-the-bay recommended this city as a permanent site for a National Command Centre back in November 2010.
The new IBM centre will use what is called cloud computing technology for storage and retrieval of vast amounts of data. Software needs will be developed under the Agile technology approach which was first proposed in 2000. The system uses the Linux operating system.
-30-
Copyright 2012 © Peter Lowry
Complaints, comments, criticisms and compliments can be sent to [email protected]