Building the Part of Facebook No One Ever Sees

Ever since we humans give up the wandering living and bulge construct rest home , architecture had one destination : To make life skilful for humans . But now , a unexampled architecture is taking shape in distant , icy corners of the world . And it ’s not plan for humans . It ’s for political machine . In this case , for the outside machines that keep Facebook churning .

In northern Sweden , just below the Arctic Circle , a new form of modular designing is being pioneer by architects based more than 5,000 mile away in the heart and soul of Silicon Valley . They ’re being result by architects like Marco Magarelli , the Datacenter Design Engineering Manager at Facebook , where he ’s lead the company ’s unusual attack to data essence for the past five twelvemonth .

As tech companies contend to ramp up smarter , quicker , and cheaper , they ’re spark a rebirth in modular , prefabricated architecture , and Facebook is top the ring . I catch the chance to confabulate with Magarelli to get hold out what it ’s like to be an architect building houses for most the humans ’s on-line identities .

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Most of us consider of the net as something intangible , a float , invisible , ectoplasmic world . In reality , the internet is tethered to the forcible world by datum center — thousands of them — that handle all of the bite and byte delivered to your computing machine .

Magarelli uses the condition “ magic box ” to describe these spaces : the great deal know they subsist , but they do n’t quite have sex how or where . And his task as the designer is “ trying to make that box as elegant and effectual as potential , ” he explains .

In my judgement , Facebook ’s wizardly loge seemed like they should be fairly straightforward buildings . Slap some servers into a box , throw on some mechanical system to cool them , make indisputable it ’s unattackable , and you ’re just to go , right ?

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Not exactly . As Magarelli explained to me , these are far from normal buildings : Some data point centers practice more than 100 time the power of a typical power construction . They need to be ultra - secure and ultra - stable against hacker , lifelike disasters , and all kinds of environmental ills . These are the building that hold the world ’s data — if they go , so does our net . So unsurprisingly , they ’re booming : the marketplace for modular data centers isexpected to reach$40 billion over the next four years .

Facebook , as the 2d most - call web site in the world after Google , needs a wad of them . harmonize to Facebook , its drug user like six billion things per day , and have shared 400 billion photograph in full — and all that activity adds up to a whole lot of information . In 2012 , Facebook reported that its users took up around 7 pebibyte of photo storage from one of its data center field every month .

Image : AP Photo / Facebook , Alan Brandt .

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To handle this exponential increment in requirement , two years ago Facebook assign three locomotive engineer to take on the challenge of “ how to scale our computing infrastructure in the most effective and economical way possible . ” As it grew , it became known as theOpen Compute Project , an go-ahead to completely modernise the ironware and internet infrastructure of Facebook ’s data centers . Most importantly , they would put all their work online , make it detached for any other company to pursue Facebook ’s lead .

The team at OCP completely redesigned every point : From more efficient server rack to backup batteries that have in mind the centers do n’t need an uninterruptible mightiness source . And just as important as all that net architecture ? genuine computer architecture .

Making Buildings Like Ikea Furniture

Magarelli conjoin Facebook in 2009 , and as part of the Open Computing Project , he staged a charrette ( the architectural equivalent of a hackathon ) to bring industry experts in lean construction — a hypothesis of construction efficiency borrowed from manufacturing — into the fold at Facebook .

Out of the event grewtwo basic design conception . You could call them Ford and Ikea . The first strategy would be like “ assemble a car on a physical body . ” You build up your geomorphologic frame , then seize all of the actual components , from lighting to transmission line , using an meeting place line in a manufactory . The whole shebang would then be driven to the building site on the back of a flatbed truck .

The 2nd scheme — the Ikea concept — was all about flatpack . Rather than assemble the module in a manufactory , the patch of the ruined edifice would be tightly packed into a flat box . Just like your bookcase computer hardware , the building component were vastly simplified and universalized to avoid mistakes during assembly . By breaking down the construction into childlike , universal bits , the concept would make building cheaper , faster , and easier — just like Ikea .

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Out of these two ideas grew the Rapid Deployment Data Center , or RDDC : What Facebook call the design of its data centre . A serial of pre - assembled modules are shipped to the site and snarl into place at unbelievable speeds , take on the good of what Ford and Ikea had open up .

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This year , Facebook will get a chance to prove the idea of RDDC . And it seems only appropriate that a design inspired by Ikea will go up in that society ’s dwelling rural area : Facebook hasannounced a novel construction projectin Luleå , Sweden , next door to its most recent data center field .

Luleå , a urban center of 46,600 the great unwashed and several well - known black alloy bands , sit far up on the coast of the Baltic , so far it ’s almost in Finland . temperature in Luleå never get very high : The warm month , July , has an fair temperature of 61 degree Fahrenheit . In February , 6 degrees is the norm . Those subarctic temperature are a major boon for data shopping center companies , which spend zillion of dollars keeping their heavily - working waiter cool .

But it ’s not just the frigidness that take Facebook here : It ’s also Sweden ’s push substructure , which is some of most safe in the human race . It also comes from renewable beginning , a major plus for Facebook , which has bought up multiple twist farms here in the US to power its stateside datum shopping center . Other companies are getting in on the action here , too , and some local entrepreneurs have even coined a slick full term for the part : The Node Pole .

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Luleå 2 will be the company ’s first data centre build using Magarelli ’s flat - pack RDDC construct . It ’ll be an experiment of sort — a way to test the ideas that OCP and Magarelli ’s team have been developing since their charrette . And when it ’s up and running , the team will take stock and give what they learned to the next labor .

The Magic Box

Believe it or not , the work Magarelli and the squad at Facebook are doing has a precedent from over a century ago . “ I retrieve back to the Industrial Revolution and how the buildings adapted to nascent industries , ” he says . “ What does a power plant , or a paper manufactory , look like ? All of these archetypes that have evolved to foregather industrial need . ”

At the turn of the last century , as the Industrial Revolution grip Europe and the US , a raw type of edifice emerged : The factory . It became an archetypical symbol amongst designer seem for a new approach to edifice . Factories were cheap , secure , tight to build , and sometimes even beautiful . Above all , though , they were built based on function , not form . Some manufactory even became sensations amongst designers : Berlin’sAEG Turbine Factoryis still taught to immature architects today . finally , there was a spare flow of ideas between industrial and avant - garde design . Even today ’s prefab home can follow their conceptual roots back to the industrial rotation .

It ’s hard not to see the parallels between factories and data center . Each type of building is design for very specific commercial natural action , and each has to adhere to strict budgets and schedules . They are both dead utilitarian .

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Yet something about the rules and requirements of commercial architecture tends to make design blossom amongst intriguer . The data center field , just like the mill of the nineteenth century , is “ a whole new type of building , ” Magarelli adds .

To most of us , the internet clean up the messiness of the physical world and transform it into something intangible , something not bad , something with zero genuine - world footprint . So it ’s strange to imagine that as 1000000000 of us sat hunched around our figurer concentrate on an only inconspicuous world , we were also feed the flames of something very tangible .

All of our click , uploads , and ilk were was draw Facebook to invent its own prototypic building : A magic box that few of us will ever see , but nearly all of us use all the time .

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