Chapter 9: The Server Room and Hydroponics Room
Translator: ShutDoor
Another day passed.
「Demo service ends in: 25 days, 14 hours, 26 minutes」
Having an expert on hand definitely made the work progress noticeably faster.
Before, whenever I wanted to install a new piece of equipment, I had to scour research papers and every other source I could find, spending a considerable amount of time on research alone. Now that Ann was here, I had much more breathing room.
As a result, we successfully completed the power facility, transformer and substation room, and battery room. The substation and power storage facilities covered 1,500 pyeong, with construction costing 2.5 trillion won and the internal equipment another 3.235 trillion won.
That came to a total of 5.735 trillion won.
The cost of the HVAC and power distribution equipment could only be properly estimated once the shelter itself was complete, so I left them out of the calculations for now.
For the record, I had no immediate use for the Juggernaut, so I hid it deep inside the entrance. I planned to call it out later when scouting the surrounding area or building military facilities.
Anyway, today I planned to build a data center. It wasn’t going to be enormous, so technically, calling it a server room would be more accurate…
But data center sounded more impressive than server room, so I decided to call it a data center.
“May I ask what the server room will be used for?”
It’s a data center.
“What will the server room be used for?”
“Tsk.”
There were several reasons, but to name only the biggest ones…
Weather forecasting, sharing data with high-performance satellites, long-range communications, and my desire to keep using the internet even after the world ended.
Unlike those fragile extroverts who started dying in real time if they couldn’t interact with other people, introverts like me could live in a bunker for all eternity as long as we had internet and ramen.
The internet was therefore directly tied to my survival. It would also let me gather information while I was at it.
“I would like to mention a Soviet study in which people crammed into a confined space developed depression and attempted suicide and murder after thirty-eight days.”
It was just a figure of speech. How could anyone actually live forever?
Every time this happened, I got the feeling she understood perfectly well and was deliberately messing with me.
“That is a misunderstanding.”
I clicked my tongue at the rude android who immediately began defending herself with a blank expression. She was supposedly made to imitate humans, so had her sense of humor been copied from them too?
If nothing else, I could tell that her jokes were aimed at people much older than me.
“That stings a little.”
“Hmm?”
“It was a joke.”
Saying something like that with a straight face was a talent in its own right.
Returning to the point, I had another reason for wanting to build the data center first.
This was one of the few fields directly related to my major. In other words, it was an opportunity to ‘properly’ assess just how knowledgeable Ann really was.
And it might give me reason to trust her even more.
“But did you not specialize in software, Administrator?”
“That’s right.”
“Strictly speaking, servers fall more on the hardware side.”
I knew that much.
But as befitted a computer science major, I knew a fair bit about hardware too.
I immediately began searching through <Shelter Builder>.
In the industry, the cabinets used to stack server computers and network equipment vertically were called racks. A rack height of 4.5 centimeters was called 1U, or one unit.
A standard large rack commonly used in data centers was roughly two meters tall and, if I remembered correctly, measured 42U.
‘I was right.’
Then let’s run the numbers on the assumption that it would be used for weather forecasting.
Ordinary forecasts by the Korea Meteorological Administration used grids with a horizontal resolution of roughly five kilometers. Put simply, they laid a dense grid of five-kilometer-by-five-kilometer squares over a map, then calculated how values such as temperature, air pressure, humidity, and wind would change within each square.
A local forecast model, on the other hand, used a much denser grid with a resolution of roughly one kilometer. A denser grid naturally allowed more detailed changes in weather to be calculated, but it also dramatically increased the number of grid cells, the amount of data required, and the computational workload. The trade-off was clear.
Naturally, I chose the latter. After all, money was the one thing I had to spare.
When preparing for an apocalypse, what could I possibly lose by having more precise weather observation equipment and a high-performance computing system?
‘Hmm.’
Anyway, how much computing power would be needed to run a local forecast model?
Maru and Guru, the supercomputers used by the Korea Meteorological Administration, had a computing performance of roughly 51 petaflops. That meant they could perform approximately 51 quadrillion floating-point operations per second.
How did I know that? It was basic knowledge for a computer science major.
“I do not believe it is.”
Anyway, using that information, I began calculating how much computing equipment would be needed solely for the weather forecasting facility.
Assuming I built a 51-petaflop system with the latest GPU-accelerated clusters, and conservatively estimated GPU performance, node configuration, and rack density…
“At least fifty to sixty 42U high-density racks would be required.”
I was just about to finish calculating that!
Then I would need about eight more racks for the ultra-high-speed storage used to hold weather data, the main network backbone, and various management equipment.
That already brought the total to fifty-eight.
It might not sound like much, but a single 42U rack usually weighed around 1.5 tons. Fifty-eight of them came to roughly eighty-seven tons by simple arithmetic, while sixty-eight came to 102 tons.
But since I would need servers for fields other than weather forecasting, I decided to build the facility around the 120-rack benchmark for a high-density data center.
And that wasn’t the end of it.
The floor itself had to be reinforced to support that much weight, and I also needed a cooling facility capable of handling the enormous amount of heat the servers produced.
And that still wasn’t the end of it!
Once the power equipment, wiring, and fire suppression systems were taken into account, I would need even more space.
And even that wasn’t the end of it!
I needed precision air conditioners, cooling-water circulation equipment, heat exchangers, and even pumps!
If they were going to put me through all this, why couldn’t they just let me use superconductors? Why were robots the only futuristic technology they had unlocked? I couldn’t begin to understand the developers’ awful design choices. If they were going to unlock anything, they should have unlocked it all.
‘High-density liquid-cooled smart racks cost 8.5 million won each, so…’
That was when Ann, who was standing beside me, casually tossed out a question.
“…Why exactly were you unable to find a job?”
“Because my parents died so suddenly?”
“Ah.”
She seemed to understand.
*****
South Korea’s National Intelligence Service.
A meeting concerning <Shelter Builder>, the software newly classified as a top-level state secret, was in full swing.
“The self-reporting users appear to have received different amounts of initial funds according to the number of survey questions they answered. After securing a sizable comparison group, we found that although their initial funds were not always identical, the amount increased significantly with the number of questions answered.”
“Almost all of them answered fewer than five questions. Isn’t the sample too small?”
The report placed before the government officials neatly summarized everything they had learned so far.
First: Every user who answered five questions or fewer received initial funds of 100 million won or less. Kim XX, who was staying in Boston for work at the time, answered four questions and received the funds in won rather than dollars. This suggests that the software possesses some mechanism capable of identifying the purchaser’s nationality.
Second: The greater a self-reporting user’s initial funds, the broader the range of items available for purchase. Most self-reporting users could purchase basic firearms, but users with greater initial funds were confirmed to have access to high-firepower lethal weapons such as mortars.
Third: All self-reporting users can use the ‘Construction’ and ‘Purchase’ functions only within a radius of approximately three kilometers from the initial location where they chose to build their shelter.
Fourth: Items ‘purchased’ in advance can be withdrawn outside that range. Once an item has been withdrawn, it cannot be placed back into storage, however…
No matter how many times the official read it, the final line remained the problem.
After rereading the report countless times, the government official finally closed the document.
They had far too little information. If their coordination with the United States had proceeded smoothly, they would have learned more by now. Even cooperation with Europe would have helped.
But the state of the world was ominous.
China had determined that the software posed a fatal threat to the current regime. It was forcibly summoning ‘self-reporting users’ from both inside and outside the country, administering truth serum and every other interrogation drug available to extract as much information from them as possible. Russia was not much different.
“Whew…”
The worst problem was that ordinary individuals could now obtain large-scale lethal weapons far too easily, and store them in spaces entirely beyond government control.
What if a hostile nation used these self-reporting users as living armories?
To put it bluntly, what if a self-reporting user with several hundred billion won in initial funds infiltrated South Korea and ‘withdrew’ large-scale lethal weapons in real time right in front of the National Assembly Building?
The mere thought sent a chill down the official’s spine.
That was precisely why the United States had been reluctant to cooperate with South Korea.
The United States had far more enemies than South Korea did.
The U.S. government had therefore stated that, with no way to predict what hostile actors in China, Russia, South America, the Arab world, and elsewhere might do, it lacked the capacity to devote attention to South Korea as well and could not cooperate.
Yet even the United States had been unable to implement a hard-line measure such as completely sealing off its airports and seaports. If it did, it would only be a matter of time before the public realized something was wrong, and society itself would immediately begin to collapse.
In the end, all the United States could do was carefully station agents disguised as civilians throughout its airports and seaports to ‘deal with’ dangerous individuals in advance.
It was reportedly pouring every available operative into that effort, both official and private.
South Korea’s situation was not much different.
Every intelligence agent except the minimum personnel needed to monitor foreign affairs had been recalled to the country.
In any case, today’s meeting had only one purpose.
In the name of national security, how far could the state infringe upon the human rights of its citizens?
“…”
The government official ran their fingers over the rosary beads around their wrist.
From now on, anyone who refused to cooperate would be branded unworthy of calling themselves a citizen.
*****
I finished building the server room, keeping it to a modest 200 pyeong. I set the ceiling height at a generous five meters after accounting for the cooling pipes, cable trays, and structural reinforcement. That brought the construction cost alone to roughly 165 billion won.
The high-density liquid-cooled racks, 51-petaflop computing node system, ultra-high-speed storage, backbone network, and coolant distribution units came to another 81.2 billion won altogether.
I even brought in Frontier, the enormous supercomputer at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in the United States and one of the foremost examples of exascale computing!
Adding up the costs of constructing the server room, its equipment, and the cutting-edge supercomputer…
It came to a staggering 846.238 billion won!
‘Hmm.’
A supercomputer server room, and it was cheaper than Ann?
The fact that this felt cheap meant my brain must have been completely broken.
For the record, Ann had handled the design. No matter how relevant my major was, I didn’t know how to design a server room on this scale.
Once the server room was more or less complete, I lay down in my tent and immediately logged on to a survivalism community.
Anonymous: There are noticeably fewer people here…
Anonymous: Where’d the assistant moderator go?
DeadBoardRegular: Is this board dead?
The number of regulars in the community had dropped sharply over the past few days. There hadn’t been many to begin with, which made the decline even more noticeable.
Survivor1: Maybe they got kidnapped or something? LOL
People were even joking that they must have been kidnapped.
‘Tsk.’
I immediately moved on to an overseas community. After all, I visited these sorts of communities to gather information, not to have fun.
Unfortunately, the South Korean community failed to satisfy my intellectual curiosity, so it was out.
The post I planned to examine today was about nutrients. The next facility I intended to build was a large hydroponic growing facility, and I wanted to determine which plants would provide the healthiest and most efficient sources of nutrients.
Naturally, I planned to prioritize taste over efficiency. That was the kind of thinking only someone with plenty of money could afford.
‘Hydroponics is definitely the way to go.’
As someone whose knowledge of biology stopped at the high school level, and who might even know less than a current high school student, I figured that leafy vegetables such as lettuce were probably the most efficient crops for hydroponics.
Plants such as rice and wheat took far too long to be ready for harvest, while with lettuce, all I had to do was pick the leaves.
Surprisingly, I was right.
Farmer113: If we’re talking strictly about hydroponics, kale and spinach are the best. They provide plenty of vitamins A, C, and K, as well as folate, iron, calcium, and more. You can harvest them about thirty days after germination, and they need less light than fruiting crops.
Farmer113: You can grow them at high density too!
Farmer113: If we’re including ordinary soil cultivation, I’d say potatoes. They’re rich in vitamins and essential amino acids, and they yield more than rice. Legumes are good too. They don’t even need fertilizer.
I wrote down all the information I had learned from the internet experts. Sometimes, practical knowledge gained from real experience was more useful than research papers.
In fact, I had done quite a lot of farmwork as a child. Both my paternal and maternal grandfathers had been farmers.
Thanks to them, until relatively recently I had spent holidays in the countryside picking persimmons, planting rice, gathering wild parsley, and harvesting strawberries, grapes, peppers, sesame, sweet potatoes, tomatoes, eggplants, beans, pumpkins, and more.
Now that I listed it all out, I’d done more than I thought.
I couldn’t compare to kids from the countryside, but among people from the city, didn’t that put me near the top in terms of farming experience? By the standards of people in their twenties these days, anyway.
‘But will kale and spinach alone be enough?’
The drawback of hydroponics was that it was extremely difficult to grow tubers like potatoes or staple calorie crops like rice and beans.
During a long stay in the shelter, surviving on a single kind of food would be impossible. I wasn’t a picky eater and generally ate anything, and I’d had no trouble eating combat rations during my military service, but even then, I figured two or three months was the limit for eating the same food over and over.
I needed to diversify the food I produced. But were there any methods besides hydroponics?
“There are aeroponics, aquaponics, solid-substrate cultivation, and mycoponics, among others. Are you not going to sleep?”
It was Ann. She hadn’t suddenly stuck her face inside my tent; I could tell from her shadow that she was standing right outside it.
“I’m going to sleep after a little more research.”
“Going to sleep after two in the morning and sleeping five hours or less a day are not recommended.”
“I know.”
A question suddenly arose in my mind. How did she know what I was thinking?
“Can you read my thoughts too?”
“Only partially.”
I got the impression that Ann was tapping her head with a finger on the other side of the tent.
“I am connected to you, Administrator.”
What are you, a Protoss?
“Please go to sleep now. It is cold outside.”
Tomorrow, I would build the hydroponic growing facility as soon as I woke up.
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