Splitting light Season 1 Episode 18 C2 Launch If you are no longer interested in the newsletter, please unsubscribe Two years after I had joined the lab, the manufacturing orders for the second generation compute were sent. A few weeks later, they were being racked in the datacenter rooms and shortly after they were released for customer use. C2 chassis Finally, all the hours we had put in, all the hair we had lost, was worth it as the hardware hit production. I intimately knew a lot of the...
9 days ago • 2 min read
Splitting light Season 1 Episode 17 Mission Statement If you are no longer interested in the newsletter, please unsubscribe Our job in the lab was to create new hardware and make it work. Then both dedicated team and cloud team would send an order depending on what they expected to sell, and we would support both throughout the lifetime of the hardware. This was our mission. Keeping this in mind was important. It was important because we could often get distracted from it. The important...
16 days ago • 3 min read
Splitting light Season 1 Episode 16 Learning how to craft PCB If you are no longer interested in the newsletter, please unsubscribe When I started my full time career five years earlier, I did not expect to work on hardware. It was something of the old times. My impressions were that hardware was packed away in a datacenter far far away never to be touched. When you think about it, this was always the case. Servers had always been far away, and there were a lot of reasons why it was. École 42...
23 days ago • 4 min read
Splitting light Season 1 Episode 15 Safe haven If you are no longer interested in the newsletter, please unsubscribe For as long as I can remember, music has always been a component of me. I had binged all the music I could get hands on since I was a teenager. I had music in headphones at work or in the metro. At home music was playing endlessly day and night. I had started with hip hop and metal. My old flatmate introduced me to electronic music, which was my bread and butter. As I met...
30 days ago • 3 min read
Splitting light Season 1 Episode 13 1st generation network equipment If you are no longer interested in the newsletter, please unsubscribe 1st generation network equipment Building computer hardware is an interesting business. The entry price is horrendous. It takes months of careful planning before you can get any physicaldevices out. Of course, the physical device is not enough. You also need all kinds of software for it to work. The First generation required two firmwares, two Linux and a...
about 1 month ago • 3 min read
Splitting light Season 1 Episode 13 Adding sidecar software If you are no longer interested in the newsletter, please unsubscribe The C1 server could not be used by the bare metal team. The nodes had little memory and no local disk. The C2 did not have these constraints and from the beginning it was designed to be used by both the cloud and bare metal teams. If both teams used the devices, that meant we produced more of them and it also meant the R&D cost could be spread on more devices. The...
about 1 month ago • 3 min read
Splitting light Season 1 Episode 12 SFP+ shenanigans If you are no longer interested in the newsletter, please unsubscribe It’s one thing to have the network working inside the board but until you are able to connect it to an external network it’s not very useful. The C2 main board had four SFP+ cages and we had to make them work. An SFP+ cage is a metal slot where you slide in a compatible connector. It’s a standard connector that enables multiple types of cables and different transport...
about 2 months ago • 2 min read
Splitting light Season 1 Episode 11 Compounding iterations If you are no longer interested in the newsletter, please unsubscribe Transferring knowledge from previous iteration By that time we had received both the server board and the main board. Pierro was working on the boot sequence and the BIOS for the Intel chips. Jérome was working on the fan and temperature control in the firmware as well as designing the chassis metal work in CAD tools. I was enabling the network features of the...
about 2 months ago • 2 min read
Splitting light Season 1 Episode 10 Two wavelengths If you are no longer interested in the newsletter, please unsubscribe This episode talks about mental health, if this is a sensitive subject for you, feel free to skip. Two wavelengths At work I was able to overcome a lot of issues on the assigned tasks. I was able to pick up every piece of knowledge or tool required to make the hardware work. I was able to create every required feature. Greg, my manager, was happy with my work. Arnaud, the...
2 months ago • 2 min read