TikTok points to capacity constraints and slow infrastructure development as the deciding factors in shelving its planned second data centre, but leaves door open to future opportunities.

The need for greater capacity, and the infrastructure development environment – these were the two key factors behind TikTok shelving a planned second data centre in Dublin, a company spokesperson told SiliconRepublic.com today (2 April) while confirming the reported decision.

Instead, the ByteDance-owned company will focus its European data storage expansion in some of its other locations – in particular, sites in Norway and one in Finland.

TikTok said that when looking at its various sites across Europe, it considered where could best meet its growing capacity demands as regards infrastructure and the speed of development, and that the Nordic countries were a better fit for those considerations.

The company said Ireland remained one of its biggest and most important strategic sites in Europe and, should future opportunities arise that did meet its capacity needs in particular, it would remain open to exploring them.

The spokesperson emphasised that the existing data centre operation in Ireland, which came online in 2023, remains fully operational as an important part of its Project Clover, and that TikTok is still very much committed to Ireland.

Project Clover is the Chinese-owned platform’s initiative designed to update its data security practices across Europe, so as not to fall foul of strict European data privacy regulations.

Part of that commitment involves storing the data of more than 150m monthly TikTok users in Europe locally across three data centres. The original stated plan was for two in Dublin and one in Norway.

TikTok had originally planned to lease data centre space at Echelon’s campus in Clondalkin, Dublin, as part of a three-site strategy. However, as Irish newspaper the Business Post was first to report earlier this week, plans for the second Irish data centre have been shelved.

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Circuit boards are found in almost every electronic device that consumers use today. When you open your phone, computer, or a basic remote control, green is the first thing you notice. That famous green hue, however, does not come from the board material itself; it is due to a special coating known as solder mask, which covers the copper traces and gives them a green tint.

The solder mask is an essential tool for any board. After etching the copper paths onto the fiberglass basis, they apply a thin layer of polymer. The mask serves two important functions: it protects the copper from oxidation and moisture, which could cause harm, and it prevents solder from bridging between close connections while you’re assembling the item, which can result in short circuits. Without the mask, fragile circuitry could easily be damaged by regular handling or exposure to the environment.

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Green became the go-to color all those years ago, when reliable solder masks first started rolling off the assembly line. The early ones used a combination of certain resins and hardeners that gave out a green tone, and it just so happened that there was an abundance of the green material available at the suppliers. So that became the industry norm. Over time, the industry has developed its entire process around this uniform green colour.

The human eye can tolerate green fairly well, especially when individuals stare at boards for hours on end under strong lighting. Green offers a fantastic contrast against the glossy copper pads and the white letters on top, reducing eye fatigue caused by staring at them for an extended period of time, since other hues have been found to be less durable. Automatic optical inspection equipment also operate better with green boards because their cameras and software have been tuned to work best with that color over time.

The cost of changing colors is also not high enough to make a significant difference. The green mask material requires less pigments in some formulations, making the production process easier because they don’t have to complicate the imaging and development procedures. The tighter design requirements associated with the conventional green color also provide them with more accurate control when exposed to ultraviolet radiation.
[Source]

So where do we go now?

The researchers said that both the RTX 3060 and RTX 6000 cards are vulnerable. Changing BIOS defaults to enable IOMMU closes the vulnerability, they said. Short for input-output memory management unit, IOMMU maps device-visible virtual addresses to physical addresses on the host memory. It can be used to make certain parts of memory off-limits.

“In the context of our attack, an IOMMU can simply restrict the GPU from accessing sensitive memory locations on the host,” Kwong explained. “IOMMU is, however, disabled by default in the BIOS to maximize compatibility and because enabling the IOMMU comes with a performance penalty due to the overhead of the address translations.”

A separate mitigation is to enable Error Correcting Codes (ECC) on the GPU, something Nvidia allows to be done using a command line. Like IOMMU, enabling ECC incurs some performance overhead because it reduces the overall amount of available workable memory. Further, some Rowhammer attacks can overcome ECC mitigations.

GPU users should understand that the only cards known to be vulnerable to Rowhammer are the RTX 3060 and RTX 6000 from the Ampere generation, which were introduced in 2020. It wouldn’t be surprising if newer generations of graphics cards from Nvidia and others are susceptible to the same types of attacks, but because the pace of academic research typically lags far behind the faster speed of product rollouts, there’s no way now to know.

Top-tier cloud platforms typically provide security levels that go well beyond those available by default on hobbyist and consumer machines. Another thing to remember: There are no known instances of Rowhammer attacks ever being actively used in the wild.

The true value of the research is to put GPU makers and users alike on notice that Rowhammer attacks on these platforms have the potential to upend security in serious ways. More information about GDDRHammer and GeForge is available here.

• HP EliteBook 6 G2q delivers up to 85 TOPS for local AI tasks
• Always-connected 5G experiences require specific hardware and preinstalled eSIM modules
• Service works only on compatible commercial PCs running Windows 11

HP has unveiled the EliteBook 6 G2q, an ultraslim AI PC that relies on Snapdragon X2 Elite or X2 Plus processors to deliver up to 85 TOPS of NPU performance for local AI tasks.

This lightweight laptop, up to 15% thinner than its predecessor, claims to offer always-connected experiences through HP Go 5G service.