Home, Sweet Home
New Experience: Home, Sweet Home. It was the phrase that opened any discussion of longing and warmth for one's home in movies or novels. Yoo Jae-won had always found it unbearably clichéd whenever he encountered it. Yet the moment he arrived at his San Francisco residence, the words sprang to mind unbidden.
Unlike the biting, frigid winds of Korea, December in San Francisco rarely dropped below six or seven degrees Celsius. A thick sweater was enough; no heavy coat required. The house itself looked exactly as he had left it. A thin layer of dust had settled, but there were no signs anyone had entered. Security patrolled daily whether he was present or not, so that was to be expected.
After running the vacuum to clear the dust, Yoo Jae-won headed straight for the bed. "I'll think about the next schedule after I sleep." He was always brimming with energy, but more than a month of nonstop campaigning, capped by intense stress, had left him exhausted. Three days at the countryside house had not been nearly enough to recover.
He collapsed onto the mattress and fell into a deep sleep.
The next day.
"Ah, I feel alive again." Sleeping at home truly felt different. The countryside house was best, but this San Francisco residence came close. By the time the sun hung high overhead, Yoo Jae-won rose with a noticeably lighter body. His appetite had returned as well; hunger struck with force. Unfortunately, the refrigerator was empty after his long absence, so he stepped out for a meal and returned with groceries. He filled both the large refrigerator and the pantry in one trip, arms loaded. Thanks to Greg and Fisher, who followed him like magnets, he avoided multiple trips.
With the house stocked, Yoo Jae-won felt at ease for the first time in weeks. He headed to the study and powered on the computer. Built with the finest components, the custom machine booted instantly, reaching the login screen in seconds. The familiar Android 1.0 desktop greeted him—an interface he knew so well it had begun to feel slightly tedious.
"Ah, this needs upgrading too." While in Korea he had updated every machine he touched to the latest version, but his main computer here had sat untouched for over a month. Android 2.0 was still in beta, yet the feature gap with 1.0 was significant enough to make the upgrade worthwhile. Business came first, however, so he logged in and opened ID Talk and Nextcom.
Ding ding ding!
Alarms erupted the instant he connected. After five days offline following the election and his return to the countryside, every pending report from the company flooded in at once. Most were routine progress updates on projects and assignments. Anything time-sensitive or requiring approval would have prompted direct calls from Choi Kang-wook or Remington.
Yoo Jae-won opened his inbox with a relaxed expression. The sheer volume and variety of subject lines alone painted a clear picture of how ID Group was running.
- Shin Japan Investment Bank: Acquisition Normalization Status Report.
- Nextcomcast: Digital Broadcast Set-Top Box Test Results.
- Nextcomcast: Fiber Optic Cable Purchase Negotiation Report.
- ID Technology: Cloud Data Center Power Failure Equipment Pilot Operation Report.
- ID Software: Doom 2 Release Preparation Complete.
- Chairman! Don't be surprised! Four Model 1 units have sold!
One title stood out in tone, but the content remained consistent: everything was proceeding smoothly. If every report simply claimed "all is well," it might indicate laziness or concealment, yet no such executive existed at ID Group. As the organization grew, blind spots beyond the audit department's reach would inevitably appear, but that day had not yet come. Above all, Yoo Jae-won's vast memory remained intact. From the smallest startup ID Technology had acquired to the newly established Shin Japan Investment Bank across the Pacific, every organizational structure existed in three dimensions inside his head. Older details might require a brief visit to his Memory Palace, but he remembered even the names of entry-level employees. Any misconduct would be detected immediately.
"Heh, I built this organization well." Self-praise followed naturally. Simply presenting a clear vision allowed ID Group's members to deploy their full capabilities, a fact evident from even a quick scan of the accumulated reports.
"By the way, four Model 1 units sold?" The email from Lightning Bolt President Michael Bolton captured his attention instantly. The Model 1 was the first electric bicycle he had commissioned for commuting to university. Neither he nor Bolton had bothered naming it at the time. Only later did Bolton, lacking confidence in naming, settle on the plain, unremarkable title "Model 1." On campus and in Silicon Valley the bike had already earned the nickname "Yoo Jae-won's bicycle," but using his name as an official product title was impossible.
"Who on earth buys a hundred-thousand-dollar bicycle?" Curiosity exploding, Yoo Jae-won opened the message at once. Had the technology not promised future applications in electric vehicles, he would have been content simply riding a motorized bicycle. Instead he had invested with the expectation of powerful returns.
"This is huge." The email contained even more surprising news: two of the four units had sold through the internet. Michael Bolton was a diligent man. Yoo Jae-won had told him to focus solely on development, yet Bolton had proactively opened sales channels. He had placed brochures at bicycle shops across San Francisco and launched an online sales site. The address was included, so Yoo Jae-won clicked through immediately.
His jaw dropped.
"Good grief. I'd love to see what kind of person looks at this and decides to spend a hundred thousand dollars on a bicycle." The site, lightningbolt.com, was roughly a million light-years behind the shopping experience he had imagined. The internet had existed for barely a year; every technology and design remained simple and rudimentary. Even so, lightningbolt.com lacked even the basics. A proper store should at least display multiple detailed photographs of its products. Instead the page contained only a handful of small, low-resolution images that revealed almost nothing.
"These look like Michael took them himself." Had he hired a photographer, the results would have been far better. The specifications were listed in exhaustive detail—too exhaustive for anyone but an expert to parse easily. Payment required full upfront wire transfer; only after one hundred thousand dollars reached the Lightning Bolt account would shipping begin.
Yoo Jae-won found himself intensely curious about the psychology of anyone who would purchase after seeing this site.
"Industrial spies, perhaps?" The thought that someone might have bought a Model 1 simply to reverse-engineer it crossed his mind. Yet the technology involved—carbon fiber, lithium batteries, and motors—was hardly revolutionary. Still, the episode confirmed that the internet was advancing faster than expected and that people were adapting quickly.
"Well then, let's start today's schedule at the data center." Originally Yoo Jae-won had planned to visit Stanford first to greet his professors after more than a month away. School matters also awaited him. Michael Bolton's email, however, changed his mind. The cloud computing data center represented ID Group's new heart. He wanted to see it operating as soon as possible.
He opened his schedule board and made adjustments. His heart urged him to go immediately—the facility lay in the small city of Coyote, just thirty minutes south of San Francisco by car. Out of consideration for the staff, however, he scheduled the visit for the afternoon. Even in America's relatively horizontal corporate culture, an unannounced visit from the chairman would trigger red alerts.
"Welcome, Chairman."
A man in his early thirties, forehead already beaded with sweat despite the cool winter air, greeted him. Joseph Wilson, formerly a network manager at Wells Fargo, had been scouted to run the cloud data center. Anxiety was plain on his face. The sudden arrival of not only Yoo Jae-won but several senior executives had naturally put him on edge. Managing twelve thousand PCs as a single cloud computer was unfamiliar work, and consolidating their power was no easier. Cisco engineers were still installing network switches, and the facility remained in disarray. News of the chairman's visit had thrown everything into chaos.
"Sorry for the sudden visit. I was simply curious how preparations were progressing. I already know the systems aren't fully ready, so please don't worry and just show me around."
Yoo Jae-won, who understood the situation better than anyone, reassured the sweating center manager. Joseph relaxed somewhat and led the group inside.
"I'll take you to the control room first. It's quite a distance."
"That's fine. Let's go."
Joseph had not been exaggerating. The walk from the entrance to the control room took nearly seven minutes and required passing through three layers of security. First came badge checks using temporary passes issued at the front gate. Next, metal detectors ensured no unauthorized storage media entered, preventing data theft or virus introduction. Finally, fingerprint scanners granted access to the main control room. Security personnel at each stage were ID Group employees, not data center staff, so even the center director held no special authority over them.
The control room itself was spartan—only a few computers and monitors. In the twenty-first century a wall-sized screen would have displayed server and network status at a glance, but current technology made this the best available solution.
"The equipment installation isn't finished yet, so it's like this," Joseph explained.
Once CCTV and other management tools were installed, the room would look more complete. Yoo Jae-won didn't mind. Beyond the large glass window, the sight of twelve thousand cloud servers already radiated overwhelming presence.
Each PC featured an AMD K5 PR66 Pentium-class CPU, 4 MB of RAM, and a 560 MB hard drive. They sat in rackmount cases stacked ten high, with 1,200 such towers arranged in forty rows of thirty. Across the football-field-sized space the towers blinked irregular green lights, resembling a living forest of computers.
The project—computers, networking gear, backup power systems, assembly labor, and the building itself—had cost roughly sixty billion won. Yoo Jae-won had briefly worried as costs climbed beyond the initial hardware estimate, but seeing the spectacle erased any regret.
"Have you run performance tests?"
A shadow crossed Joseph's face as he stood beside Yoo Jae-won admiring the servers.
"Ah, well…"
Tests occurred daily, yet no formal report had been sent because results remained far below design targets. Twelve thousand Pentium-class machines should have placed the system among the world's top ten supercomputers. Instead it failed to crack even the top fifty. Individual PCs performed adequately, but combining them produced bottlenecks that prevented the expected performance.
"There are both hardware and software issues."
The answer sounded oddly familiar—like a basketball coach claiming the team was failing at both offense and defense. In other words, everything was wrong. Given the time and money invested, a sharp retort nearly escaped, but Yoo Jae-won held it back. Although the cloud server concept existed, constructing one at this scale was unprecedented for him. First attempts always involved trial and error; this was simply part of the process.
"Fine. Let's take a look ourselves."
Moreover, Yoo Jae-won possessed the ability to solve such problems. Having worked with artificial intelligence from the ground up in his previous life, he also understood the hardware requirements. With no reason or authority to refuse an owner inspection, Joseph guided him to the main console.
The welcome Android desktop appeared. Large-scale systems typically ran Unix, but an ID Group company naturally used its own operating system. This was not the standard Android 1.0, however, but a specially enhanced version optimized for networking.
"The connections look good."
All twelve thousand machines linked properly to the mainframe in the control room. A grid of status indicators showed twelve thousand green lights representing normal operation—so many that scrolling to the bottom took considerable time. While the display was simple, the physical networking had been grueling. Cisco engineers had painstakingly connected every LAN card and hub while eliminating collisions. Success here would elevate Cisco's networking expertise, benefiting both the company and its major shareholder, ID Group.
Yoo Jae-won launched the benchmark program, which ran various distributed-processing examples. The results appeared quickly on a plain console. Rendering and other easily parallelizable tasks exceeded supercomputer speeds, but calculations requiring sequential reference—such as prime-number searches—crawled. By the numbers, even a Cray supercomputer from two years earlier outperformed the system.
The cause was obvious. Execution and result reporting were both slow. Although network connectivity was solid, data exchange between machines was sluggish, dragging overall performance down. Network speed was not the only bottleneck. Even the newest Pentium CPUs felt slow, memory transfer rates lagged, LAN cards were underpowered, and hard-drive read/write speeds were inadequate. Every component was slow; naturally, the aggregated cloud computer suffered.
One root cause explained it all.
"The fundamental problem is semiconductors as slow as turtles."
The smallest unit in any computer component was the semiconductor. Slow semiconductor operation made everything else slow. Conversely, faster semiconductors would solve the issue in one stroke. That realization set Yoo Jae-won's next destination: Stanford University.
Postponing the planned ID Technology visit, he drove straight to campus and sought out his advisor without preamble.
"Professor! It's been a while. If you're conducting any research aimed at improving semiconductor performance, could you give me a list?"
The professor had intended to exchange pleasantries after such a long absence, but the abrupt request caught him off guard. He recovered quickly. Working at Stanford, he had seen countless students and colleagues become obsessed with a single topic to the exclusion of everything else. Compared with Yoo Jae-won's recent fixation on a Korean presidential election that had kept him away for nearly two months, this sudden interest in semiconductors was refreshingly appropriate.
"Oh? This time you've latched onto semiconductors. How fortunate."
Professor Chu-Cheng immediately powered on his computer and began searching the university intranet, determined to provide results before Yoo Jae-won could change his mind again.