Dyson Shoal

The Dyson Shoal, officially the Skerry Distributed Training Array, is the seabed computer that grew out of Skerry Alpha's first ring. By 2041 it was 7,680 compute pods across some 1,800 square kilometres of the central North Sea, linked by power and fibre and served by six training rigs. Nobody calls it by its official name.

The name first appeared in an engineering newsletter, after Freeman Dyson's swarm of machines around a star; the North Sea version is rather wetter and involves considerably more barnacles. Haar Compute disliked it for about six weeks, then somebody in marketing bought the domain.

How it is built

The rigs are not the computers. They are workshops, power stations, crew hotels, helicopter terminals and ROV bases: places with cranes, where broken things come up and working things go back down. Pods are laid in shoals of sixteen; shoals form banks; banks connect to one of six service nodes. The software treats the whole thing as one machine. The hardware does not: if a pod fails, work routes round it. "We stopped trying to build a data centre," says Fiona Gauld. "Data centres are buildings. This is infrastructure." The people who run it say it's a fishery.

It breathes. On a windy night it is among the largest single users of electricity in Britain; when the weather changes, low-priority jobs pause, whole banks drop away and stored power carries the base load. In February 2041 it completed the main training run for Kelvin, Britain's national foundation model. It is monitored by ear, in layers from the whole array down to a single pod, by the technique Daniel Okafor invented.

The arguments

The pods are colonised by mussels, anemones and soft corals within months, with cod and pollack gathering round the banks: Haar calls it an artificial reef, its critics a flattering name for an industrial estate. Its protection zones close a large stretch of sea to trawling. A fibre trunk was cut in 2039, in circumstances the Royal Navy still won't discuss, and the Shoal is now patrolled. And four-fifths of its capacity is rented, much of it to foreign labs. "We built the cathedral," one Scottish MP says, "and we're renting out the pews."

Behind the scenes

The Dyson Shoal is the subject of "Dyson Shoal", the last story in Oil Rigs to Training Rigs, by Charlotte Joanne at Blind Ant.