Intel office :: 2
And let's go straight to the point. Most recently, I returned from Nizhny Novgorod, where I visited the regional office of Intel. In addition to Habrakhabr (represented by me), other projects also went to the “link across Russia” - IXBT, Ferra, 3DNews, RIA Novosti and other well-known publications.
We all learned a lot of new things about the company's activities in Russia, which I want to do under the cut - the second attempt came out more detailed and interesting.
In fact, it was a regular press tour, which was combined with another event. I'm talking about the program " 3 days with Intel ", the advertising of which you could see on the site; so that along with us there were also 5 winners of this event - the most ordinary people interested in IT, who were not ashamed to take part in the competition and did everything to win it. The contest, by the way, lasted for half a year, which made it possible to select only those to whom this entire excursion would be really interesting.
')
The Intel Research and Development Center in Nizhny Novgorod was opened in May 2000 (I already wrote about the history of its discovery) and is located at ul. Turgeneva, d. 30. In the company's terminology there is such a thing as a “site” - a kind of synonym for the word “location”. Now about 450 people work in the Nizhny Novgorod site, which can be divided into the following groups:
Information technology (IT) is a fairly large group, which for the most part is engaged in supporting the performance of other departments, is responsible for the infrastructure of the entire office.
The mobility group (MG) is the very people who develop the hardware and software implementation of wireless Internet access. These people, for example, are directly involved in the development of 802.11 and 802.16 standards.
Software and Services Group (SSG) is the largest group in Nizhny Novgorod (about 270 out of 450 people). They are mainly engaged in the development of software products: Intel optimizers and compilers, libraries for improving performance, digital signal processing and image visualization, the development of a multiprocessor and multithreaded programming system, issues of parallelization of computations. One of the most important projects being conducted within the walls of the Nizhny Novgorod laboratory can rightly be called the Intel Parallel Studio , the second version of which was released quite recently.
Group sales and marketing (SMG) - are engaged in supporting the company's customers, including outside the Russian Federation.
The Manufacturing Technology Group (TMG) is a small group dedicated to semiconductor and optics research. Other areas of research are the study and creation of probabilistic graphical models, the creation of machine learning libraries, video monitoring technology (video defect detection) and wireless data transmission technologies.
Administrative and business group - accounting, personnel department, external relations department, etc.
I would like to dwell in more detail on the information technology (IT) group, namely, in the service of support. One of the tasks of this division is to achieve maximum productivity and efficiency of work processes. And to succeed in all this is not so easy, especially when it comes to the entire corporation as a whole. Some statistics: about 80,000 employees of the corporation account for about 90,000 computers (80% of which are laptops). About 7,000 access points and about 14,000 handheld devices (smartphones-communicators) can be added to this fleet of serviced equipment, with the help of which many employees gain access to corporate information, thereby increasing their mobility. Of the entire state, the IT group accounts for about 6,300 people located in 25 regions (in 63 offices). These people also have 95 data centers (with a total area of ​​more than 38,000 square meters and with a total consumption of 55 MW), i.e. a huge number of servers (about 100,000 in more than 5,000 racks) with large computing power. More than 177 million e-mails pass through the company's server per month. Here it is.
Our tour of the building of the company was accompanied by a very rich technical seminars, part of the memories of which I try to share.
It was interesting to visit one of the laboratories of the office, engaged in testing equipment for the provision of service advice for system integrators. This is the only laboratory in Russia and the CIS countries (the same is only in England), possessing the full range of products (server and desktop systems) of Intel company, released over the past few years - up to different revisions of each product! Thanks to this, it is possible to provide unique customers (integrators) with a unique service of its kind, recreating most of the necessary configurations right in the laboratory.
The company's engineers test them with various means for software compatibility and performance under different conditions, so by the time of the announcement and the start of deliveries of these new products, the company's technical support can not only fully cover various aspects of the application, but also give advice on practical integration in production, carry out technical workshops and training on new products and technologies.
It was a long and interesting story about a no less interesting development - the Remote Test Laboratory (Remote Lab), which enables testing of new products to interested customers via the Internet, providing access to modern equipment and engineering samples. This approach allows you to learn in advance about the performance of new devices, their compatibility with various products, but at the same time reduce the risks and time for integration; Such a function is especially relevant before the launch of new products - when they are not officially available anywhere else, but especially interested customers already have the opportunity to twist and rotate the novelty remotely. Additionally - the possibility of organizing online seminars and training, regardless of the distance to the client.
In addition to the server part, the laboratory also has a division that specializes in netbooks, tablets and other mobile systems.
Within the laboratory, we were told about some of the perspectives and aspects of the new MeeGo operating system (you can read it here ), as well as Intel Atom processors, supporting the words with various demonstrations. For example, clearly showed the difference in load times of two identical netbooks running under different operating systems.
It also turned out that modern platforms based on the new Intel Atom with much less (at times) power consumption, bypass the speed of the system on the once-top Intel Pentium 4 processors and their corresponding discrete cards. Maybe this is not the most correct comparison, but the difference in megahertz and watts consumed is significant.
As a bonus, an unbranded prototype of a MeeGo-based tablet was shown, which I will try to review in the very near future.
Our arrival to the building began with the passage of a security check point - there we were given plastic visitor badges. Further safety instructions followed - they told how and where to run.
The improvised means detected a wireless network (the signal of which is caught throughout the building), but with the Internet there is strictly - just go in and sit on the network via wi-fay will not work. For each member of the press a separate account was created on day 1, with a complex login and password. But, according to employees, it is possible to get access to most of the internal information necessary for work from home, via an encrypted vpn-channel.
On one of the floors, a small bonus lounge was found, which contained a game console, table football, an electronic “plate” installation and a stack of various IT magazines that can be read on the couch. On some walls there are large boards on which printed articles from various sites are hung. I expressed my dissatisfaction with the absence of Habr and it seems to be like promising to correct this misunderstanding :) Well, what, I’m not the only one writing about Intel.
The walls of one of the floors are decorated with respects and respects. Especially remember this: " ICANN - International Community Association of Nizhny Novgorod " :)
On each floor there is a small “snack bar”, where there is always tea-coffee and something else. We were surprised by hanging bags with a medical disinfecting gel - in case it is not possible to wash your hands. They are said to have appeared not so long ago, when news about all sorts of viruses and other misfortunes spread through the news.
At the unregulated intersections of the office area, on the ceilings are fixed "mirrors of the general form", in which everything is visible and even a little more. This is the case so that two people (or a wall against a wall) do not hit and, for example, do not pour hot tea over each other. Well or hot coffee.
Surprised cabinets with the words "ORT". You would never guess what is in them! the channel has nothing to do with it - inside there is a different fire ammunition designed for volunteer firefighters. Everything is new, everything is charged and ready for battle) Does anyone remember when the last time he had a workout evacuation in the event of a fire? I vaguely remember such an event only from school years ... here all this is fulfilled with enviable constancy - the maximum time for evacuation of all people along the stairs is 8 minutes (and 80-90% go out in the first 3-5 minutes). Periodically appearing auditors (in the person of various instances) do not find any shortcomings, on the contrary, they praise for an exemplary approach.
We went outside where it was cold and damp.
It turns out that Mercedes is not only a “tse-el-ka” and “Gelika”, but also a 700-kilowatt diesel generator! At least, this is what stands in a small extension on the first floor. In the event of an emergency, the generator is able for about a day (without supplying additional fuel) to fully supply the most important parts of the office with electricity, including all infrastructure elements, such as telephone-Internet-video cameras, etc.). He eats such a monster about 100 liters of fuel per hour and runs for about 30 seconds, and serviceability is checked every month. The total power consumption of the entire office is about 2 MW.
Above the generator are two floors of armored windows, in case it “burns out,” so that no one is hurt. There is also a separate room with a large number of UPSs (or batteries for them), on the total charge of which the office can work for about 30 minutes.
The external cooling system of the building (fan-coils), blowing out heat from the electronics working in the building, is buzzing right next door (as I understood, it was about the data center). In the future, they want to improve this process and direct the “blown out” heat in the second circle for heating hot water and other needs. In winter, when it is cold, some of the cooling systems are turned off and the servers are cooled by the environment through another kind of clever system. This approach allows you to save a huge amount of energy / money - I don’t remember the exact order, but we are talking about tens / hundreds of thousands of $. Yevgeny Kozlovsky joked delicately - “ And you will take these cooling units to the polar circle, save even more ” :)
Around the building there is a rather large asphalted site, it’s also parking for company employees (for those who come on bicycles and motorcycles, there is a separate section with a shed). Apparently, the far corner of this particular site is the safest in case of evacuation. There are a few horizontal bars (I saw only parallel bars) and a basketball court. There was a great lack of greenery (compared to, for example, the Moscow office; perhaps this is due to the time of year), but they said that they would work on this issue, but for now - more priority tasks.
On a plot of land owned by the company, it is possible to build a second similar building (already with underground parking), but in the next few years this is not necessary.
Back in the building again to warm up. Actually, we noticed the dining room and decided to look there out of the corner of the eye. There is nothing unusual except that there is one public (for the office) camera inside, through the web interface of which you can at any time assess the scale of the queue. This was done to once again not to run back and forth and not waste time. At the exit from the dining room, I paid attention to the black and yellow rectangular contours around almost every door - “you go there ne hadi, and then dar papadot!”. Offset
Perhaps that's all for today. After walking around the office and laboratories, we began to prepare for another interesting event, which I will discuss next time.
Successes!
We all learned a lot of new things about the company's activities in Russia, which I want to do under the cut - the second attempt came out more detailed and interesting.
In fact, it was a regular press tour, which was combined with another event. I'm talking about the program " 3 days with Intel ", the advertising of which you could see on the site; so that along with us there were also 5 winners of this event - the most ordinary people interested in IT, who were not ashamed to take part in the competition and did everything to win it. The contest, by the way, lasted for half a year, which made it possible to select only those to whom this entire excursion would be really interesting.
')
The Intel Research and Development Center in Nizhny Novgorod was opened in May 2000 (I already wrote about the history of its discovery) and is located at ul. Turgeneva, d. 30. In the company's terminology there is such a thing as a “site” - a kind of synonym for the word “location”. Now about 450 people work in the Nizhny Novgorod site, which can be divided into the following groups:
Information technology (IT) is a fairly large group, which for the most part is engaged in supporting the performance of other departments, is responsible for the infrastructure of the entire office. The mobility group (MG) is the very people who develop the hardware and software implementation of wireless Internet access. These people, for example, are directly involved in the development of 802.11 and 802.16 standards. Software and Services Group (SSG) is the largest group in Nizhny Novgorod (about 270 out of 450 people). They are mainly engaged in the development of software products: Intel optimizers and compilers, libraries for improving performance, digital signal processing and image visualization, the development of a multiprocessor and multithreaded programming system, issues of parallelization of computations. One of the most important projects being conducted within the walls of the Nizhny Novgorod laboratory can rightly be called the Intel Parallel Studio , the second version of which was released quite recently. Group sales and marketing (SMG) - are engaged in supporting the company's customers, including outside the Russian Federation. The Manufacturing Technology Group (TMG) is a small group dedicated to semiconductor and optics research. Other areas of research are the study and creation of probabilistic graphical models, the creation of machine learning libraries, video monitoring technology (video defect detection) and wireless data transmission technologies. Administrative and business group - accounting, personnel department, external relations department, etc.I would like to dwell in more detail on the information technology (IT) group, namely, in the service of support. One of the tasks of this division is to achieve maximum productivity and efficiency of work processes. And to succeed in all this is not so easy, especially when it comes to the entire corporation as a whole. Some statistics: about 80,000 employees of the corporation account for about 90,000 computers (80% of which are laptops). About 7,000 access points and about 14,000 handheld devices (smartphones-communicators) can be added to this fleet of serviced equipment, with the help of which many employees gain access to corporate information, thereby increasing their mobility. Of the entire state, the IT group accounts for about 6,300 people located in 25 regions (in 63 offices). These people also have 95 data centers (with a total area of ​​more than 38,000 square meters and with a total consumption of 55 MW), i.e. a huge number of servers (about 100,000 in more than 5,000 racks) with large computing power. More than 177 million e-mails pass through the company's server per month. Here it is.
Our tour of the building of the company was accompanied by a very rich technical seminars, part of the memories of which I try to share.
It was interesting to visit one of the laboratories of the office, engaged in testing equipment for the provision of service advice for system integrators. This is the only laboratory in Russia and the CIS countries (the same is only in England), possessing the full range of products (server and desktop systems) of Intel company, released over the past few years - up to different revisions of each product! Thanks to this, it is possible to provide unique customers (integrators) with a unique service of its kind, recreating most of the necessary configurations right in the laboratory.
The company's engineers test them with various means for software compatibility and performance under different conditions, so by the time of the announcement and the start of deliveries of these new products, the company's technical support can not only fully cover various aspects of the application, but also give advice on practical integration in production, carry out technical workshops and training on new products and technologies.
It was a long and interesting story about a no less interesting development - the Remote Test Laboratory (Remote Lab), which enables testing of new products to interested customers via the Internet, providing access to modern equipment and engineering samples. This approach allows you to learn in advance about the performance of new devices, their compatibility with various products, but at the same time reduce the risks and time for integration; Such a function is especially relevant before the launch of new products - when they are not officially available anywhere else, but especially interested customers already have the opportunity to twist and rotate the novelty remotely. Additionally - the possibility of organizing online seminars and training, regardless of the distance to the client.
In addition to the server part, the laboratory also has a division that specializes in netbooks, tablets and other mobile systems.
Within the laboratory, we were told about some of the perspectives and aspects of the new MeeGo operating system (you can read it here ), as well as Intel Atom processors, supporting the words with various demonstrations. For example, clearly showed the difference in load times of two identical netbooks running under different operating systems.
It also turned out that modern platforms based on the new Intel Atom with much less (at times) power consumption, bypass the speed of the system on the once-top Intel Pentium 4 processors and their corresponding discrete cards. Maybe this is not the most correct comparison, but the difference in megahertz and watts consumed is significant.
As a bonus, an unbranded prototype of a MeeGo-based tablet was shown, which I will try to review in the very near future.
Office Tour
Our arrival to the building began with the passage of a security check point - there we were given plastic visitor badges. Further safety instructions followed - they told how and where to run.
The improvised means detected a wireless network (the signal of which is caught throughout the building), but with the Internet there is strictly - just go in and sit on the network via wi-fay will not work. For each member of the press a separate account was created on day 1, with a complex login and password. But, according to employees, it is possible to get access to most of the internal information necessary for work from home, via an encrypted vpn-channel.
On one of the floors, a small bonus lounge was found, which contained a game console, table football, an electronic “plate” installation and a stack of various IT magazines that can be read on the couch. On some walls there are large boards on which printed articles from various sites are hung. I expressed my dissatisfaction with the absence of Habr and it seems to be like promising to correct this misunderstanding :) Well, what, I’m not the only one writing about Intel.
The walls of one of the floors are decorated with respects and respects. Especially remember this: " ICANN - International Community Association of Nizhny Novgorod " :)
On each floor there is a small “snack bar”, where there is always tea-coffee and something else. We were surprised by hanging bags with a medical disinfecting gel - in case it is not possible to wash your hands. They are said to have appeared not so long ago, when news about all sorts of viruses and other misfortunes spread through the news.
At the unregulated intersections of the office area, on the ceilings are fixed "mirrors of the general form", in which everything is visible and even a little more. This is the case so that two people (or a wall against a wall) do not hit and, for example, do not pour hot tea over each other. Well or hot coffee.
Surprised cabinets with the words "ORT". You would never guess what is in them! the channel has nothing to do with it - inside there is a different fire ammunition designed for volunteer firefighters. Everything is new, everything is charged and ready for battle) Does anyone remember when the last time he had a workout evacuation in the event of a fire? I vaguely remember such an event only from school years ... here all this is fulfilled with enviable constancy - the maximum time for evacuation of all people along the stairs is 8 minutes (and 80-90% go out in the first 3-5 minutes). Periodically appearing auditors (in the person of various instances) do not find any shortcomings, on the contrary, they praise for an exemplary approach.
We went outside where it was cold and damp.
It turns out that Mercedes is not only a “tse-el-ka” and “Gelika”, but also a 700-kilowatt diesel generator! At least, this is what stands in a small extension on the first floor. In the event of an emergency, the generator is able for about a day (without supplying additional fuel) to fully supply the most important parts of the office with electricity, including all infrastructure elements, such as telephone-Internet-video cameras, etc.). He eats such a monster about 100 liters of fuel per hour and runs for about 30 seconds, and serviceability is checked every month. The total power consumption of the entire office is about 2 MW.
Above the generator are two floors of armored windows, in case it “burns out,” so that no one is hurt. There is also a separate room with a large number of UPSs (or batteries for them), on the total charge of which the office can work for about 30 minutes.
The external cooling system of the building (fan-coils), blowing out heat from the electronics working in the building, is buzzing right next door (as I understood, it was about the data center). In the future, they want to improve this process and direct the “blown out” heat in the second circle for heating hot water and other needs. In winter, when it is cold, some of the cooling systems are turned off and the servers are cooled by the environment through another kind of clever system. This approach allows you to save a huge amount of energy / money - I don’t remember the exact order, but we are talking about tens / hundreds of thousands of $. Yevgeny Kozlovsky joked delicately - “ And you will take these cooling units to the polar circle, save even more ” :)
Around the building there is a rather large asphalted site, it’s also parking for company employees (for those who come on bicycles and motorcycles, there is a separate section with a shed). Apparently, the far corner of this particular site is the safest in case of evacuation. There are a few horizontal bars (I saw only parallel bars) and a basketball court. There was a great lack of greenery (compared to, for example, the Moscow office; perhaps this is due to the time of year), but they said that they would work on this issue, but for now - more priority tasks.
On a plot of land owned by the company, it is possible to build a second similar building (already with underground parking), but in the next few years this is not necessary.
Back in the building again to warm up. Actually, we noticed the dining room and decided to look there out of the corner of the eye. There is nothing unusual except that there is one public (for the office) camera inside, through the web interface of which you can at any time assess the scale of the queue. This was done to once again not to run back and forth and not waste time. At the exit from the dining room, I paid attention to the black and yellow rectangular contours around almost every door - “you go there ne hadi, and then dar papadot!”. Offset
Perhaps that's all for today. After walking around the office and laboratories, we began to prepare for another interesting event, which I will discuss next time.
Successes!
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/106911/
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