Data Center Links: May 3, 2017

Here are some (mostly) recent things I found interesting:

• Shaw explores selling ViaWest: Sources 'familiar with the matter' say that Canadian cable company Shaw Communications is exploring options for selling ViaWest. Shaw bought ViaWest three years ago for $1.2 billion.

• Amazon Strategy Teardown.  CB Insights has an amazing, detailed analysis of strategy at Amazon.  Company history, AI-as-a-Service, acquisition highlights, 'aggressive' growth plans, and initiatives by sector.  Wow.

• iRobot: Vacuuming up Microservices on AWS.  I like cloud architecture stories. This one just spoke to me -- about microservices and modern applications and services.  "Ben Kehoe, Cloud Robotics Research Scientist at iRobot, explains how they built a serverless solution to power microservices that scale to control millions of robots. You’ll learn how they automate and optimize AWS Lambda function and Amazon API Gateway deployments with AWS CloudFormation and Swagger, plus how they inject information during the deployment process to decouple architecture details from the code."

• Will Molten Silicon make Lithium-Ion 'Uneconomic'?  Australian company 1414 says it has  developed a molten silicon thermal energy storage system (TESS) that can store 500 kilowatt-hours of energy within a 70-centimeter cube. At 36x the capacity of a 14 kilowatt hour Tesla Powerwall 2 the company says it could build a 10 megawatt-hour plant for around AUD $700,000 (USD $528,000), or a tenth of the price of a Tesla battery-based project.

• MIT Mathemetician spins up 220,000 core Google Compute Cluster.  Google announced that MIT math professor and computational number theorist Andrew V. Sutherland crafted a 220,000-core workload on Google Compute Engine using preemptable virtual machine instances. Sutherland is already planning an even larger run of 400,000 cores.

• Path to Exascale. At a user forum U.S. Exascale Computing Project (ECP) director Paul Messina outlined the accelerated timetable with delivery of the first exascale machine now scheduled for 2021. The ECP is a collaborative effort of two U.S. Department of Energy organizations, the Office of Science (DOE-SC) and the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA).