dognovel Chapter 365 The Academy of Sciences' Heating System
Chapter 365 The Academy of Sciences' Heating System
Sunday, November 18, 1990.
At 9:03 a.m. sharp, Kozlov appeared on the hotel porch.
He changed his coat today. It was still dark blue, but newer than yesterday's, and the shoulder line wasn't sagging.
The convoy traveled along the south bank of the Moscow River for twenty minutes.
Kozlov spoke the entire time.
It speaks of the history of the Soviet Academy of Sciences, its contributions to both national defense and civilian sectors, and that "the Soviet people's enthusiasm for science is immeasurable."
Shuichi, holding the hot tea provided by the hotel, nodded and said, "Remarkable," "Admirable," and "The prospects for scientific exchanges between Japan and the Soviet Union are undoubtedly broad."
Kozlov would pause every few sentences to have his accompanying liaison officer translate before continuing.
Satsuki sat by the window, listening, occasionally nodding slightly at appropriate moments.
She did not speak.
The street outside the window unfolded in the morning dust. At this hour, there were more pedestrians on the road.
Someone was carrying a paper bag and walking quickly, as if rushing to meet some deadline. Someone was leading a hunting dog with prominent joints and a deeply tucked-in waist.
Satsuki turned her gaze away.
……
The building of the Computing Center of the USSR Academy of Sciences was located at the end of a relatively remote street.
The snow had stopped when the convoy stopped in front of a gray-white building.
The building itself does not look shabby.
It has a wide main entrance, thick stone exterior walls, and a metal plaque above the lintel that has become somewhat dark.
But once inside, the chill didn't disappear immediately.
It was cold in the hallway.
Unlike the foreign guest hotel where Satsuki and the others stayed, the heating here could only be described as "mild".
"Whew—why is it so cold here... I woke up several times last night because I was so hot."
Amy followed beside Satsuki, her shoulders slightly hunched, and said in a low voice.
"Perhaps... we need to 'concentrate our resources on accomplishing major tasks'?"
"The Academy of Sciences is probably a lower priority than our foreign guest hotel."
Satsuki didn't turn around, speaking softly.
"You're on track! This is the part you're most interested in."
"Yes, yes! I've heard that Soviet mathematics was world-class!"
Amy jogged to catch up with the group.
"Lord Saionji, welcome, welcome."
The person who came to receive us was the deputy director of the computing center.
His surname was Belov, he was forty-seven or forty-eight years old, his hair was neatly combed back, and he wore a pair of thin-rimmed metal glasses on his nose.
His old suit was clearly ironed, with neat shoulder lines and a perfectly tied tie.
The cuffs are badly worn.
The fabric on the left cuff was already faded, and a small loose thread was showing on the right. When he spoke, he would subconsciously pull his hand to his side, as if worried that others would see it.
Shuichi stepped forward and shook hands with him.
"Deputy Director Belov, thank you for your hospitality today."
Kozlov stood between the two, smiling knowingly as he acted as their translator.
"The Computing Center attaches great importance to this visit," Deputy Director Belov said in Russian. "We have long been committed to numerical computing, scientific and engineering simulation, and international academic exchange."
"In the past three years, the center has participated in six international collaborative projects, published 29 papers, and its researchers have attended conferences in Warsaw, Prague, and East Berlin..."
Kozlov's translation is very solid.
Xiu nodded slightly, his tone gentle.
"Your center has achieved remarkable results, which are truly admirable."
Satsuki stood half a step to her father's side, her hands folded in front of her, a well-behaved smile on her face.
She seemed to be listening attentively.
In fact, the gaze had already shifted from Deputy Director Belov's cuff to the other side of the corridor.
The first office was lit, and there were three people inside. An older researcher was writing something at a desk, while two younger people were sharing a terminal.
The second door was closed, and a piece of paper was pasted on the glass that read "Equipment Maintenance." There were no lights inside.
The third room had its door half open, and the bookshelves inside were half empty. There were two cardboard boxes on the table, as if someone had just moved out, or as if no one had ever returned.
The notice board is next to the stairwell.
As Satsuki passed by, she didn't stop walking, but her eyes swept over the few pieces of paper on the paper.
Notice on Adjustments to Consumable Allocation in the Fourth Quarter of 1990
Temporary List of Some Equipment Transferred to Storage Status
Review of Dormitory Allocation for Young Researchers
There was also a personnel transfer notice with the corners rolled up.
She saw several names marked with "outward assignment", "further training", or "pending".
To be determined.
Satsuki's eyelashes drooped slightly.
Amy was holding her tool bag, initially looking rather lazy.
Her gaze darted between the plaster on the walls, the radiators, and the wooden doorknobs, finally settling on an old printer on a trolley.
"Satsuki-chan..."
She kept her voice very low.
"The equipment here feels much older than that at the University of Tokyo."
"I thought the machines at the University of Tokyo were old enough..."
Satsuki did not turn back.
"Um."
"These machines will be running simulations until next year..."
"They used these machines to enable the Soviet Union to compete with the United States."
Amy blinked.
She looked up and gazed ahead.
The double doors at the end of the corridor were pushed open, and a low hum of a fan came from inside.
We've arrived at the server room.
……
The server room was warmer than the corridor.
It's just a little warmer.
Several rows of server racks lined the wall, a mix of gray, beige, and light green, with numbers affixed to their exteriors.
Some of the nameplates are worn, but the production years are still legible—1981, 1983, and 1985.
The newest one has a nameplate indicating it was built in 1987.
Satsuki's gaze swept across the next row of server racks.
That was it.
After Gorbachev came to power in 1987...1985, did the equipment stop being updated?
Amy's eyebrows twitched as soon as she came in.
She was about to speak when her gaze fell on the back of the server rack.
Cables.
The old machines themselves were nothing special, but the cables were very clean.
It's not "pretty" clean.
It is the kind of cleanliness that, after countless plugging, modification, and replacement, is still maintained by people using minimal materials to maintain order.
Each bundle of thread was carefully tied with cloth tape, and the labels were handwritten, with traces of different people writing them, but the format was consistent.
The hot and cold air directions were artificially separated, and several of the worst heat-dissipating devices were moved to the side near the window. A homemade baffle was even installed under the window frame to direct the cold air to the back of the cabinet.
These old artifacts are being well cared for.
Amy's expression slowly changed.
"...Huh?"
Satsuki glanced at her.
"What's wrong?"
"These people know how to manage their money."
Amy whispered.
Satsuki couldn't help but smile.
"Is that considered a compliment, given that it takes place in the server room?"
"Yes," Amy said, staring at the row of cables. "That's a very high compliment."
Deputy Director Belov had already taken his place in front of the computer room.
"Next, we will have three researchers introduce the center's recent research directions."
After Kozlov finished translating, he added a sentence.
"They are all very experienced comrades from the center."
The first researcher was an elderly professor in his fifties.
His surname was Petrov, he had gray hair, and he wore a dark brown sweater with an old wool coat over it.
The content introduced covers traditional numerical calculations, partial differential equation solving, fluid simulation, and stress analysis of engineering materials.
He spoke in a very conventional manner.
The formulas on the blackboard were written very steadily, every conclusion had a source, and every set of data was kept within the allowed range for display.
Xiu Yi couldn't understand the details, but he could tell that the person was old-fashioned.
So after the other person finished speaking, he smiled and said:
"Your solid research is the foundation that any country's scientific system needs."
Professor Petrov paused for a moment.
He probably didn't expect a Japanese person of Chinese descent to say such a thing.
He then bowed slightly.
「Спасибо.（Thank you.）」
The second person was a female researcher in her early forties.
Natalia Mikhailovna.
She was wearing a dark gray suit, her hair was tied up, and she was holding several pages of typed manuscript in her hand.
She does theoretical work on communication protocols.
She speaks very logically, or rather, too logically.
Each paragraph is like a pre-defined area, the speaking speed is not fast, and the key points are clear.
"In distributed nodes, we mainly study message acknowledgment mechanisms in high-fault-tolerant environments, and redundant coding schemes in unstable physical links..."
Kozlov struggled with the translation.
Amy was just listening at first.
Upon hearing a certain word, she suddenly looked up.
Natalia paused for less than half a second halfway through her sentence.
That half second was very short.
She was so short that she thought she was taking a breath.
But Satsuki saw it.
Natalia's gaze shifted from the typed manuscript to a roll of undisplayed drawings next to the blackboard. She seemed about to add something, but Deputy Director Belov coughed softly beside her.
So she continued reading the script.
"...The above is the preliminary result that can be introduced at present."
I can introduce it.
Satsuki kept this word in her heart.
The third researcher came out last.
Alexei Orlov.
She was in her thirties, rather thin, with slightly messy hair and faint dark shadows under her eyes.
The cuffs of his sweater were rolled up, and there were ink stains on his fingers.
Compared to the previous two, his appearance on stage lacked the formality of the previous two, as if he had just been called from another room to complete a task that had to be performed.
When Deputy Director Belov introduced him, his tone was much more concise.
"Comrade Orlov is in charge of some applications of network simulation and parallel computing scheduling. Now, let's ask him to give a standard demonstration."
Application work.
Satsuki paid more attention.
Orlov sat down at an old terminal and typed a few lines of commands.
Green characters appear on the screen, and the program starts running.
At first, Amy just looked at her politely.
Ten seconds later, her gaze froze.
Twenty seconds later, she moved forward a little.
Thirty seconds later, she took out a paper notebook from her tool bag, then a pencil, and began to write rapidly.
Satsuki stood next to her, unable to understand the output parameters.
But she could understand Amy.
When Amy sees something boring, her lips will slightly twitch down, and her fingers will reach for the screwdriver in her tool bag. When she sees something interesting, she forgets where she is.
Now she's forgotten to blink.
On the terminal screen, tasks are divided into several segments and allocated, recycled, and redistributed among different nodes.
The machine is old.
The response speed is incorrect.
Amy muttered to herself.
"This is impossible..."
She wrote a word in her notebook, then crossed it out.
"That's not right either..."
Orlov finished his presentation and was preparing to get up.
"Excuse me."
Amy suddenly called out to him in English.
Your bottleneck isn't computation. Where is the latency? The transport layer, or the scheduling queue?
The computer room fell silent for a moment.
Orlov was stunned.
He looked at Deputy Director Belov.
Belov was talking to his fellow student, and Kozlov was translating, so they weren't paying attention to what was happening here.
Orlov hesitated for a moment, then answered in English.
Neither. Physical link is slow, yes, but the real delay is synchronization barrier. We avoid global barriers when the task graph allows partial ordering.
Amy's eyes lit up.
"Then you're not doing simple batch scheduling. Do you have dependency prediction?"
"Not prediction. Conservative estimation. If the dependency graph is sparse, we pre-allocate a window."
"Window size?"
"Dynamic. Based on failure rate and message acknowledgement."
"Your acknowledgement mechanism is too expensive."
"We'll compress it."
"How? (How to compress?)"
Orlov paused for a moment.
This time, he did not answer immediately.
He countered with:
If your nodes fail silently, do you trust the timeout mechanism or redundant witnesses?
Amy's pencil stopped on the paper.
She looked up at him.
It was as if a narrow bridge, invisible to others, had suddenly appeared between the two of them.
"Depends on the cost of a false positive."
Orlov smiled.
That was the first time he had shown a nearly genuine expression since he entered the room.
Good answer.
Amy smiled too.
"Of course."
Just as she was about to ask another question, Deputy Director Belov turned around and walked towards her.
"It's almost time."
"Next, we'll visit the archives."
Orlov shut his mouth.
Amy also tucked the notebook into her arms, behaving as if nothing had happened.
Satsuki glanced at Belov, then at Orlov.
Judging from the director's attitude, he was not highly regarded, and could even be described as a marginalized person.
Of course, this does not mean that he was a completely overlooked person.
The fact that he was brought here means that at least someone knows he is useful.
This system simply prefers to write value on a different form—equipment, staffing, project level, superior approval, and demonstrable results.
One machine can be placed in the exhibition hall.
One terminal can capture photos for reporting.
A blueprint for an automated management system can be displayed on the wall.
The jobs that can be applied to are different; it's not as glamorous.
How much synchronization barriers have been reduced, how much waiting time has been saved after message confirmation compression, and how much more computing power has been saved after the task graph changed from global blocking to partial order—these things don't have a pretty shell and are hard to write into a sentence that can make a minister nod in approval.
This system doesn't display its gems in a showcase.
The side effects of technocratism have already begun to stagnate the country.