Comment by semi-extrinsic 15 days ago
What do you mean 10 years?
You can pick up a DGX-1 on Ebay right now for less than $10k. 256 GB vRAM (HBM2 nonetheless), NVLink capability, 512 GB RAM, 40 CPU cores, 8 TB SSD, 100 Gbit HBAs. Equivalent non-Nvidia branded machines are around $6k.
They are heavy, noisy like you would not believe, and a single one just about maxes out a 16A 240V circuit. Which also means it produces 13 000 BTU/hr of waste heat.
Opt if you ignore that both gas furnaces and heat pumps are more efficient than resistive loads.
I'm in the market for an oven right now and 230V/16A is the voltage/current the one I'll probably be getting operates under.
At 90°C you can do sous vide, so basically use that waste heat entirely.
For such temperatures you'd need a CO2 heat pump, which is still expensive. I don't know about gas, as I don't even have a line to my place.
The choice of BTU/hr was firmly tongue in cheek for our American friends.
You’ll need (2) 240V 20A 2P breakers, one for the server and one for the 1-ton mini-split to remove the heat ;)
Matching AC would only need 1/4 the power, right? If you don't already have a method to remove heat.
Cooling BTUs already take the coefficient of performance of the vapor-compression cycle into account. 4w of heat removed for each 1w of input power is around the max COP for an air cooled condenser, but adding an evaporative cooling tower can raise that up to ~7.
I just looked at a spec sheet for a 230V single-phase 12k BTU mini-split and the minimum circuit ampacity was 3A for the air handler and 12A for the condenser, add those together for 15A, divide by .8 is 18.75A, next size up is 20A. Minimum circuit ampacity is a formula that is (roughly) the sum of the full load amps of the motor(s) inside the piece of equipment times 1.25 to determine the conductor size required to power the equipment.
So the condensing unit likely draws ~9.5-10A max and the air handler around ~2.4A, and both will have variable speed motors that would probably only need about half of that to remove 12k BTU of heat, so ~5-6A or thereabouts should do it, which is around 1/3rd of the 16A server, or a COP of 3.
Well I don't know why that unit wants so many amps. The first 12k BTU window unit I looked at on amazon uses 12A at 115V.
Just air freight them from 60 degrees North to 60 degrees South and vice verse every 6 months.
> “They are heavy, noisy like you would not believe, … produces … waste heat.”
Haha. I bought a 20 yro IBM server off eBay for a song. It was fun for a minute. Soon became a doorstop and I sold it as pickup-only on eBay for $20. Beast. Never again have one in my home.
That's about the era my company was an IBM reseller. Once I was kneeling behind 8x1U starting up and all the fans went to max speed for 3 seconds. Never put rackmount hardware in a room that is near anything living.
Are you talking about the guy in Temecula running two different auctions with some of the same photos (356878140643 and 357146508609, both showing a missing heat sink?) Interesting, but seems sketchy.
How useful is this Tesla-era hardware on current workloads? If you tried to run the full DeepSeek R1 model on it at (say) 4-bit quantization, any idea what kind of TTFT and TPS figures might be expected?
I can’t speak to the Tesla stuff but I run an Epyc 7713 with a single 3090 and creatively splitting the model between GPU/8 channels of DDR4 I can do about 9 tokens per second on a q4 quant.
Impressive. Is that a distillation, or the real thing?
Fair warning: the BMCs on those suck so bad, and the firmware bundles are painful, since you need a working nvidia-specific container runtime to apply them, which you might not be able to get up and running because of a firmware bug causing almost all the ram to be presented as nonvolatile.