The Physics Lesson

The time: 11:00 PM The place: a data center in Salt Lake County The event: an air-conditioning outage.

Enter our protagonist. Let’s call him Bubba. Bubba hand-scans past the door of the data center floor to try to bring down some machines (and bring up some others), and is blasted with a wave of oven-like heat from the thousands of computers acting like little space-heaters in a confined space.

Bubba enters the cage containing our computers. Most of them have already shut down due to the overwhelming heat. Some few, mostly older units or computers nearer to the floor, are struggling along. Bubba sees a new, junior system administrator attempting to bring up some important production machines that had crashed.

Bubba notices three large, brand-new window air conditioners sitting on the floor. The raised-floor tiles are pulled up. These AC units are plugged in. Their fronts face the inlets of this junior admin’s machines.

The rear, hot side, faces the disk arrays to which these machines are attached.

Now, for those in the audience who think that opening your refrigerator on a hot summer day will help to cool off your house, here’s a quick science lesson. The rules of conservation of energy are simple: matter can neither be created nor destroyed. You can’t get more out of a system than you put into it; the best you can hope for is to break even.

By leaving your refrigerator open to try to cool off your house — unless it’s a refrigerator from the turn of the 20th century that runs on actual ice blocked from a river and stored for months under some straw — you’re actually making your house hotter. Yeah, really! That little space in front of the fridge is the only thing getting cooler; those hot coils in the back are blasting lots more heat than cold, resulting in an overall warming of your house.

Air-conditioners are, basically, refrigerators. But they make your house cooler by pumping the heat outdoors.

In effect, what Mr. Jr. Admin was doing was adding three enormous space heaters to the inside of a stewing oven, and pointing the hottest part of their blast cone right at the disks supporting the environment he was trying to bring up.

I don’t know what else to say, although some clever hand-gestures and sophomoric noises come to mind.