Where is the GPU?
maybe the real GPU was the friends we made along the way
How oxide cuts data center power consumption in half
81–90 of 185 posts
Re: How oxide cuts data center power consumption in half
#82If any Oxide staff are here, I'm just curious, is BlueSky a customer? Seems like it would fit well with their on-prem setup.
Not Oxide or Bluesky, but firstly I'd suggest that asking the company about their customers is unlikely to get a response, most companies don't disclose their customers. Secondly, Bluesky have been growing quickly, I can only assume their hardware is too, and that means long lead time products like an Oxide rack aren't going to work, especially when you can have an off the shelf machine from Dell delivered in a few d…
> most companies dont disclose their customers
In my head I'm imagining an average landing page. They slap their customers on there like stickers. I doubt bluesky would stay secretive about using oxide if they did
Re: How oxide cuts data center power consumption in half
#83Earlier quoted context omitted.
>This creates a single point of failure, trading robustness for efficiency. There's nothing wrong with that, but software/ops might have to accommodate by making the opposite tradeoff. I'll happily take a single high qualify power supply (which may have internal redundancy FWIW) over 70 much more cheaply made power supplies that stress other parts of my datacenter via sheer inefficiency, and also costs more in aggreg…
A DC busbar can propagate a short circuit across the rack, and DC circuit protection is harder than AC. So of course each server now needs its own current limiter, or a cheap fuse. But I’m not debating the merits of this engineering tradeoff - which seems fine, and pretty widely adopted - just its advertisement. The healthcare industry understands the importance of assessing clinical endpoints (like mortality) rather…
DC circuit protection is absolutely not harder than AC. DC has the advantage in current flowing in only one direction, not two
Re: How oxide cuts data center power consumption in half
#84How long before a VPS pops up running Oxide racks? Or, why wouldn't a VPS build on top of Oxide if they offer better efficiency and server management?
Because they use such esoteric software that you'll forever be reliant on Oxide.
I'd rather they use more standardized open source software like Linux, Talos, k8s, Ceph, KubeVirt. Instead of rolling it all themselves on an OS that has a very small niche ecosystem.
Re: How oxide cuts data center power consumption in half
#85I’m rooting for solutions like this as an alternative to the public cloud.
I do see that an org would rely on one company that theoretically can do a ‘Broadcom VMware’ on them but I don’t get this vibe from 0x1d3 at all.
But they target large orgs, I wish a solution like this would be accessible for smaller companies.
I wish I could throw their stack on my second hand cots hardware, rent a few U’s in two colos for geo redundancy and cry of happiness each month realizing how much money we save on public cloud cost, yet having cloud capabilities/benefits
Re: How oxide cuts data center power consumption in half
#86Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah but the failure rate of an analog piece of copper is pretty low, it'll keep being copper unless you do stupid things. You'll have multiple power supplies provide power on the same piece of copper
TL/DR, isnt there a single, shared, DC supply that supplies said piece of copper? Presumably connected to mains? Or are the running on SOFCs?
The big piece of copper is fed by redundant rectifiers. Each power shelf has six independent rectifiers which are 5+1 redundant if the rack is fully loaded with compute sleds, or 3+3 redundant if the rack is half-populated. Customers who want more redundancy can also have a second power shelf with six more rectifiers.
Re: How oxide cuts data center power consumption in half
#87I really wish Oxide had homelab/prosumer grade stuff. I'd be sending them so much money.
Re: How oxide cuts data center power consumption in half
#88Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not Oxide or Bluesky, but firstly I'd suggest that asking the company about their customers is unlikely to get a response, most companies don't disclose their customers. Secondly, Bluesky have been growing quickly, I can only assume their hardware is too, and that means long lead time products like an Oxide rack aren't going to work, especially when you can have an off the shelf machine from Dell delivered in a few d…
> most companies dont disclose their customers In my head I'm imagining an average landing page. They slap their customers on there like stickers. I doubt bluesky would stay secretive about using oxide if they did
Those customers listed on the front page of companies are there as part of an agreement. Usually something like a discount. Certainly they are not listed without permission. 10x that if it is a case study.
Re: How oxide cuts data center power consumption in half
#89Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think engineers should be more forceful to lead their own visions instead being led by accountants and lawyers. After engineers have the power of implementation and de-implementstion. They need to step into dirty politics and bend other people's views. It's either theirs or ours. Win-win is a fallacy.
Being able to navigate this is what differentiates a very senior IC (principal, distinguished, etc) and random employees.
Yes. I think as an engineer at this level you need to also have the patience to deal with the bean counters.
But as I’ve grown in my career I’ve actually found that line of thinking refreshing. Can you quantify benefit? If it requires too many assumptions it’s probably not worth it.
But then again there’s always the Vp or the svp who wants to “showcase his towers’ innovative spirit” and then there goes money that could be used for better things. The innovative spirit of the day is random Llm apps.
Re: How oxide cuts data center power consumption in half
#90Earlier quoted context omitted.
I will add that consumer macOS is a piss-poor server OS. At one point, for many years, it would just sometimes fail to `exec()` a process. This would manifest as a random failure on our build farm about once/twice a month. (This would manifest as "/bin/sh: fail to exec binary file" because the error type from the kernel would have the libc fall back to trying to run the binary as a script, as normal for a Unix, but i…
Did that ever get fixed? That...seems like a pretty critical problem.
Yes, it quietly stopped happening a few years ago, sometime since 2020.